Quality improvements in variance estimation for the labour force survey

The Italian National Institute of Statistics, along with other European countries, is involved in the improvement efforts for the Labour Force Survey (LFS) in the context of the new IESS (Integrated European Social Statistics) framework regulation. The IESS framework regulation asks for several actions that have to be undertaken by National Institutes of Statistics in order to achieve improvements in LFS. Among these actions, additional indicators for the annual point and annual net changes are request. Furthermore, the related estimates of variance of the estimates must be produced. The requested indicators are mainly simple ratios (annual point) or difference of ratios (annual net changes), therefore nonlinear parameter must be linearized to derive the estimates of variance. Moreover, when computing the sampling variance the overlapping among the samples, due to the rotation scheme adopted in the Italian LFS, has to be taken into account. In this work the methodology used to produce annual point, annual net changes and the related variance estimations is illustrated