The EU Regulation on “short-term statistics” (Council Regulation No 1165/98 of 19 May concerning short-term statistics) and the related methodological manual (Methodology of short-term statistics, Eurostat) impose a uniform reporting obligation on volume changes in the monthly retail sales of the European Union member countries – as an important leading indicator.
Source of data:
mandatory data collection titled “Report No. 1045 on the sales turnover of retail trade and catering services” of the National Data Collection Program (OSAP) ordered by the government,
VAT data to estimate mail order and online trade turnover,
monthly data of the National Tobacco Trading Company to determine the turnover of specialized tobacco shops (from 1 July 2013).
Scope of data providers: enterprises operating shops (regardless of their main activity and legal form).
The data collection is based on operating licenses issued by local governments as well as on the HCSO aggregate register of officially declared activities (Commercial Register). In the data collection, the scope of data providers consists of two parts. The following units are in the so-called full-scope part: enterprises with at least 50 employees operating at least 6 shops; enterprises operating at least 7 shops regardless of the number of employees; enterprises with a significant floor area of shops in the relevant field of activity. The selection of all other shops is made on the basis of a stratified simple random systematic sample. Among shops in the sample a 25–30% rotation is performed per year. Smaller sample adjustments are made in every six months with the selection of new shops to replace liquidated shops.
Observation unit: a shop to sell retail items mainly to households.
Imputation: missing data is imputed primarily by the projected data from the previous period, in the absence of that by the environmental-average or by data derived from other sources in case of key data providers.
Data correction, revisions: data may differ from the previously published data because of the retrospective corrections of erroneous data provided earlier as well as the subsequent acceptance of belatedly provided data.
Retail sales: the value of the sale of goods in the retail network at current prices.
Sales data of retail shops and household consumption data measured within the framework of the Household Budget and Living Conditions Survey (HBLCS) may differ from each other due to methodological reasons. While data on micro level household expenditures derive from a voluntary data collection based on the own admission of the observed households and cover such products and services which can only be interpreted at the level of households, retail sales data can only be interpreted as product sales, which, beyond household consumption, include, among other things, the purchases of foreign tourists and those living along the borders as well. Place of residence and place of shopping of the population may also differ from each other, which in respect of the territorial indicators of consumption may lead to further discrepancies.
Unadjusted (crude) volume index: : it shows changes in retail sales turnover at current prices by eliminating the effect of price changes. The retail price index necessary to determine the volume of traffic is calculated on the basis of the representatives of consumer price monitoring and of retail sales weights.
Seasonal adjustment: time series of the volume index are adjusted with seasonal and calendar effects. The adjustment is made by JDemetra+-software; due to the nature of this method adjusted data may be modified retrospectively.
Calendar-adjusted volume index: the value of retail sales volumes adjusted for working day, holiday, Easter and leap day effects. If the time series are expanded, the calendar-adjusted data may change retrospectively.
Contribution to change in the calendar-adjusted volume of sales turnover it shows how much each business type contributes to changes in the volume of retail sales in the country. The indicator is calculated in such a way that the year-on-year volume indices of the components are weighted with their calendar-adjusted sales for the reference month.
Publication of our data:
first estimate (35 days after the reference month): aggregated data on retail sales by food, non-food and fuel sales,
second estimate (50–55 days after the reference month): more detailed aggregated data on retail sales
final, revised data (one year after the reference month).
On 1 July 2013, the structure of tobacco retailing was transformed. At the same time, there was a change in the source of retail data: the full-scope data of the National Tobacco Trading Nonprofit Company have been available since July 2013. Instead of the previous sample survey based estimate, HCSO uses the comprehensive tobacco sales data to provide statistics on the sales of specialized tobacco stores, which are included in the turnover of specialized food, beverage and tobacco stores. Therefore, the retail sales data of the period from July 2013 to June 2014 are not comparable to the data of the same period of the previous year. The previous sample survey based estimate is also given for this period to ensure the comparability. For the period from July 2013 to June 2014, the data reported in parallel are available here.