Price index for employment activities

Developing a price index for NACE rev.2 78 Employment activities is part of a broader project in Statistics Norway that focuses on price statistics. The development of a price index for Employment activities started at the beginning of 2008 and will be published for the first time during the spring of 2010.

We have studied experiences from other countries that have already established an SPPI for Employment activities. We have developed a method based on these experiences, and of course our own studies of the market in Norway, our meeting and correspondence with the National Federation of Service Industries (NHO Service) and selected members of important enterprises in the industry. We use the industry classification given to us by NHO Service, which consists of three more fields of activities than we had intended by looking at the Classification of Products by Activity (CPA). The industry is divided into three sub-classes: 78.100 Labour recruitment of personnel, 78.200 Provision of personnel and 78.300 other human resources provision services. The latter industry sub-class is very small and we have decided to omit it from this SPPI. 78.200 provision of personnel is the larger of the remaining two.

The method used in this price index can briefly be summarised as follows: the price measure in the survey is the turnover and hours billed in the particular quarter for provision of personnel. For labour recruitment of personnel we collect an average fee per person employed. The average fee is divided into two categories of employees; executives and other personnel. For provision of personnel we divide the industry into 12 fields of activity. These methods are both characterised as B – methods, and are therefore approved and acceptable methods (Handbook on price and volume measures in national accounts, 2001). We started collecting data from the 1st quarter of 2008.

The prices are compared with the previous period, which we use as a base period and chained with the previous results (1st quarter 2008 - q-1). The first weights are collected in 2008, and we will update them every year. The results from the first six quarters indicate that the total index follows a reasonable development, with a continuous increase in all the six first quarters, as shown in table 7.1. From the 1st quarter of 2008 to the 2nd quarter of 2009, the total index has grown by 6.3 per cent.