Employment indicator; to sector/branches

The employment indicator is a sentiment indicator for the Dutch private sector regarding the total employment of enterprises. When assessing the results, it can be assumed that the more optimistic or pessimistic the entrepreneurs are, the more the value of business confidence will deviate positively or negatively from the zero line. A positive figure for the indicator indicates an expansion of the workforce, a negative figure indicates a shrinking workforce.

The employment indicator in the total Dutch private sector is a weighted average of the confidence indicators of the underlying sectors/industries, which together form a representative reflection of the Dutch business community from an economic viewpoint.

The aggregation ‘all enterprises (no finance or energy)’ includes all available branches questioned in the Business Survey Netherlands. Because not every branch is questioned monthly, this aggregation will only have data available for the first month of each quarter. The aggregation ‘C industry, H-S services and 45+47’ includes all monthly questioned branches and serves as a subtotal of the monthly questionnaire.

Data available from: January 2012.

Status of the figures: The figures in this table are definite.

Changes as of February 6th 2025: Figures of January 2025 have been added.

During an evaluation of the weights being used for the business survey, it became apparent that in recent years the weights for construction in the figures for the total of all enterprises (no finance or energy) were too large to be economically justified. For this reason the weights for constructions have been decreased and this has been applied to the entire time series. This caused a slight shift in most figures for the total of all enterprises (no finance or energy).

The following 1st digit branches have been added:

• M Other specialized business services
• N Renting and other business support

When will new figures be published? Figures of February are expected to be published the 27th of February 2025.