Labour force survey, seasonally-adjusted figures, March 2010

The labour force is the sum of employed and unemployed between 16-74 years of age. From December to March the employment fell by 2 000, while there was an increase in unemployment of 4 000. This gives an increase in the labour force of 2 000.

The coherence between the concepts

Unemployed + Employed = Labour force

Labour force + Outside the labour force = Population

Employment and unemployment figures include permanent residents

The LFS only includes persons who are registered as residents in the population register. Persons working in Norway who are not registered as permanent residents or who are planning to stay for less than six months are not included in the employment figure in the LFS. If these people lose their job it does not count as a fall in employment or a rise in unemployment. In national accounts figures (NR), employed non-residents are included in the employment figure as long as they work in an establishment in Norway. If employment decreases in this group it will count as a fall in employment in NR. Statistics Norway publishes separate figures for all registered non-residents once a year. See short-term immigrants .

Uncertain figures

The purpose of making seasonal adjustments is to describe the development over the last year, corrected for seasonal variations. In order to reduce uncertainty, the published series are three-month moving averages of the seasonally-adjusted figures. However, uncertainty means that sampling errors must be considered when interpreting the figures from the LFS. We normally compare the latest non-overlapping three-month periods. An overview of sampling errors in the LFS can be found in " About the statistics ", chapter 5 section 3.

Quarterly LFS figures, not seasonally adjusted, are presented in a separate article .