El empleo aumenta en 67.012 afiliados en términos desestacionalizados en el periodo que va de mitad de enero a mitad de febrero

The average affiliation observed in the period from mid-January to mid-February has registered an increase compared to the average of the previous two fortnights of 67,012 people, in seasonally adjusted terms.

The increase recorded in this period is higher than that observed in January (average of the previous two fortnights), in which there was an increase of 57,726 affiliates, and is also higher than the average twice-weekly increase recorded in the last three months (23,713).

With the latest data available, the total number of affiliates stands at 20,333,566, which is 92,672 more than at the end of 2022 and 571,697 more than at the end of 2021.

New methodology

The biweekly affiliation statistics offered since January 2023 by the Ministry of Inclusion, Social Security and Migration is based on two advances that provide a clearer view of the evolution of affiliation and that allow the labor market to be monitored with data of greater frequency than monthly, unique available until that date.

The first novelty is the new monthly seasonality factors, which contemplate in their elaboration both the years of greatest impact of the pandemic (2020 and 2021) and the first full year of recovery (2022). This improves the accuracy of the seasonal adjustment; until then, the last year used in the estimate was 2019.

The second advance is the seasonal adjustment of daily data, with a methodology that allows to debug the daily affiliation figures from the effects of seasonality and calendar. With them, the labor market can be monitored with data of greater frequency (weekly, biweekly) than the monthly.

Finally, in order for the high-frequency series adjusted data estimates to be published to be consistent with the monthly periodicity seasonality adjusted data, an adjustment is made that ensures consistency, and thus a daily factor fully compatible with the monthly one is obtained.

These daily factors make it possible to align the publication and distribution of data with that of the most advanced countries in this field and offer specialists and the public new possibilities for analysis and interpretation of the evolution of the labour market.

Use of the data

The affiliation data presented in this note and in the attached tables are compiled from the average of two fortnights, which are compared with the average data of the two fortnights immediately preceding. In this way, it is possible to count in the middle of the month with a data equivalent to the monthly and that exactly matches the monthly in the data of the end of the month, and more stable data are obtained, which show more clearly the situation of the labor market than using data of greater frequency, such as weekly data.

The data will be published fortnightly on the ministry’s website.

NOTE

Methodology used to estimate daily seasonal factors

The estimation of the seasonal component with daily data is done by means of a structural model of non-observable components: trend, seasonal component and irregular component. Its acronym TBATS defines some of its properties (T: approximate seasonality by trigonometric functions, B: Box-Cox transformation, A: ARMA representation for the irregular component, T: Trend, S: seasonal components). The affiliation series has multiple seasonality since the seasonal component consists of a weekly cycle, an intra-monthly cycle and the annual cycle, with the particularity that the intra-monthly cycle has a high variability in the last days of the month. The model is estimated from 2011 to the end of 2022. For further details, see the methodological note: https://run.gob.es/hun751d7