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Main changes of ISPV since 2011

The Average Earnings Information System (ISPV) administered by the Ministry of Labour and Social Affairs surveys the level of earnings in the Czech Republic. In 2011, several radical changes were made in ISPV. The main changes are the following:

Change of terminology. Since 2011, ISPV has been using the term wage sphere instead of the business sphere and the term salary sphere instead of the non-business sphere. The wage sphere includes economic operators who provide remuneration to employees in the form of wages pursuant to Section 109 (2) of Act No. 262/2006 Coll., the Labour Code, as amended. The salary sphere includes operators under which the employees are remunerated in the form of a salary pursuant to Section 109 (3) of Act No. 262/2006 Coll., the Labour Code, as amended. The terms business and non-business sphere are used by the Czech Statistical Office (CZSO), those terms corresponding to the classification by institutional sectors. Within ISPV, employees are classified according to whether they are remunerated by wage or salary, which is not fully compliant with the classification by institutional sectors and therefore new terms were selected. New terminology should contribute to higher caution of users when comparing results from individual sectors pursuant to ISPV and CZSO.

Changes in publications. As of 2011, the periodicity and contents of individual result publications of ISPV changed. A publication about wages and working hours sorted by fields is issued for each quarter. For each even quarter, this publication is extended by information about hourly earnings. Publications for the wage and salary spheres including data about wages and working hours classified in detail, in particular by individual jobs, are issued for the first half year and for the whole year. Once a year, publications for individual regions of the Czech Republic are issued within the Regional Earnings Statistics (RSCP).

Harmonization of ISPV methodology with the Czech Statistical Office (CZSO). Since 2011, the methodology for processing of data included in ISPV is harmonized with the wage statistics of CZSO. Within the harmonization, the ISPV set was inter alia extended by operators not monitored before. The benefit of the harmonization rests in improved quality of the published wage statistics.

The ISPV set was extended by employees of:

  • legal persons with less than 10 employees,
  • natural persons and non-profit institutions regardless of the number of employees.

Extension of the basic set allowed additional calculation of data covering the whole population of employees in the wage sphere. Therefore since 2011, all ISPV publications newly state weighed numbers of employees in thousands.

Due to implementation of the harmonization, the gross monthly wage median for the wage sphere decreased in 2011. In order to be able to carry out a correct comparison of wage development, the publications include year-on-year indices calculated using the reviewed data for 2010.

Quality of the estimated gross monthly wage median. In the half-year publication for the wage sphere, the quality of the gross monthly wage median was published for the first time. Quality of the estimated gross monthly wage median by job subgroups and categories CZ-ISCO is specified in Table MZS-M8 in the column Estimate quality. The estimate quality is divided into 3 categories "A", "B" and "C", category "A" characterizing the best quality estimates of the gross monthly wage median. Symbols "A", "B" or "C" stated in brackets identify those jobs in relation to which there is a natural dominance of one or two economic operators.

Classification of occupations CZ-ISCO. In 2011, there were significant changes made in classification of occupations due to the transition from the original classification KZAM-R to the new classification CZ-ISCO. Due to the change of the classification, results by jobs specified in the half-year publications for 2011 for the wage (or salary as the case may be) spheres in the tables MZS-M7 and MZS-M8 (or PLS-M7 and PLS M8 as the case may be) cannot be subject to year-on-year comparison with the results specified in the tables for the business (or non-business as the case may be) sphere until 2010 (tables PS-M1 and PS-M5, or NS-M1 and NS-M5 as the case may be).

9/23/2011