STATISTICAL BUSINESS REGISTERS AS BACKBONE FOR BUSINESS STATISTICS

Joint UNECE/OECD/EurostatBusiness Registers expert meeting

14-15 September 2011,OECD, Paris, France

Clemens SchröterEurostat

Business Registers as guardians of statistical units

Recommandations: Statistical business registers shall become the place in the

NSI where the statistical units are maintained and produced for all business related statistics.

Statistical compilers shall only refer to those units which are maintained in the statistical business registers.

Statistical compilers shall apply the units in the register without any further modifications.

The Enterprise: the core statistical unit in the business register

High quality data on 'enterprise groups‘ in the business registers are essential

Include ‘profiled’ units Exchange micro register data with other countries (e.g. EGR) Ensure that the enterprise units is accepted by statistical

compilers and the collection of statistical data is ensured accordingly

Liaise with national accounts in order to keep the 'enterprise unit' and 'institutional unit' for the corporate sector identical

The global worldwide structures of enterprise groups have an impact on deriving national 'autonomous' enterprise units from the observable legal units.

Recommendations

The local kind of activity unit and the business register ?

Is it an observable – identifiable and/or reporting unit? Is it a meaningful unit (a centre of cost, not a centre of

profit)?

The SNA and the ESA request to partitioning enterprise units into more homogenous units as regards their activity and their geographic location

Practice:Derived from ‘Local Unit’ surveys or ‘Enterprise’ surveys

Recommendation:The 'local kind of activity' breakdowns of the enterprise units should be recorded and maintained in the Business Registers

The Business Register as a vehicle to support the statistical production process

For the preparation of surveys: all business survey populations are drawn from the same register, so their population frames are complete and consistent.

For the coordination of surveys: survey coordination should be strengthened in NSIs and the reference database should be the business register.

For the summing-up of survey results: statistical business registers should allow to complementing/ weighting survey results in order to avoid biased results

Business Registers should contain

Up-to date information on units and their characteristics - including time stamps and source code: Live Register

Population frames on statistical units - for particular reference periods used by several statistical compilers

From initial to final population frame

November November

February May August

Active in initial frame

Overcoverage

Undercoverage

Client oriented data quality management

Ongoing review of user requirements Close relations with any surveys coordination units Helpdesk for statistical compilers

Tools for users: Service to identify units in the Business Register Interface allowing to consult and propose updates in the

business register Interface which interacts with the business register for

designing, coordinating and the summing up of surveys

Access / exchange of business register data

1. Exchange with other national statistical authorities

Recommendation: No limitations

2. Exchange with foreign statistical authorities

Recommendation: Establish common confidentiality regime by binding agreements (e.g. EGR)

3. Access to non statistical users

Recommendation: Manage the register in the NSI in such a way that that there is an administrative register domain (exchange possible) and a statistical domain (exchange not possible)