Dissemination and statistical use of Business Register data Conference of European statisticians Group of experts of Business Registers Luxembourg, 6-7 O2ctober 2009

Oct 20092Tuula Viitaharju Business Register in Finland - duties Compile statistics concerning business population and business demography Base register for production of statistics Provide chargeable information services to outside users Future plans

Oct 20093Tuula Viitaharju Business Register in Finland - 40 years (1) Main phases of development 1954, 1964 business censuses output: statistics on business population 1970’s, regular register maintenance, main ideas: statistics of business population contributing NA statistics

Oct 20094Tuula Viitaharju Business Register in Finland - 40 years (2) intensive development phase: increasing coverage development of register based statistics production development of base registers and business identification codes increasing use of administrative files growth of chargeable information services background: early phases of information society, rationality in sharing data on basic units with all users in society

Oct 20095Tuula Viitaharju Income from Business Register services

Oct 20096Tuula Viitaharju Business Register in Finland - 40 years (3) from 1995 on, topics like: EU regulations quality questions, small area statistics dynamics, complex business structures, globalisation enterprise group unit response burden Annex 1 in my paper: milestones in the development of Business Register

Oct 20097Tuula Viitaharju Business register, number of business enterprises - increasing coverage

Oct 20098Tuula Viitaharju main BR duties 1: Compiling statistics

Oct 20099Tuula Viitaharju Compiling and dissemination of statistics - business population from Business Register production database -> we produce annual data files for source of annual statistics = a kind of frozen version of BR for each reference year file of enterprises file of local units threshold: 0,5 employment and 6 months activity period (comparable statistics over time) it means more workload to produce the annual data file

Oct Tuula Viitaharju Compiling and dissemination of statistics - business population statistics by NACE, by region, by legal form, by size category of employment and turnover, variables: employment, turnover, sum of wages and salaries in StatFin database: enterprises, local unitsenterprises,local units analysis published in Statistics Finland home pages(EN) (FI)home pages(EN) (FI) paper publication ‘Enterprises in Finland’

Oct Tuula Viitaharju Compiling and dissemination of statistics - business demography from Business Register production database it is compiled quarterly statistics on ‘Enterprise openings and closures’ statistics by NACE, by region, by legal form, variable: number of enterprises in StatFin -databaseStatFin analysis published in Statistics Finland home pages(EN) (FI)home pages(EN)(FI) business demography statistics according to EU harmonised method are not yet published in Finland

Oct Tuula Viitaharju main BR duties 2: Business Register use in statistics production process the most important role of Business Register

Oct Tuula Viitaharju Business Register use in statistics production BR database collects and merges plenty of administrative data as common frame for statistics (annex 2 of the paper) BR is important tool when linking administrative and survey data BR is survey frame for all direct data collections BR is data source in register based statistics production it provides basic units, classifications, employment, turnover as an example: recently SBS in Finland gave up collecting and estimating employment data for itself and started to use exclusively BR employment variable Tool of profiling activities Tool for enterprise respondent service Tool in statistics on globalisation - enterprise groups

Oct Tuula Viitaharju Sharing Business Register data - in-house BR database is in wide use inside Statistics Finland about 300 users from economic as well as from social statistics on-line access or reading by batch programs use is supported by BR metadata kept available in Statistics Finland (quality reports, time table of BR updating, variable descriptions, process descriptions)

Oct Tuula Viitaharju In-house co-operation, examples common data collection with FATS-statistics on foreign owned enterprises (MNEs in Finland) common data collection with regional employment statistics on multi-site enterprises (their local units and employment-local unit links) profiling large and complex enterprises - the network coordinator is working in BR – profiling activities started in 2008

Oct Tuula Viitaharju Enterprise respondent register contains information from all Statistics Finland business data collections respondent service about Statistics Finland data collection enables measuring response burden

Oct Tuula Viitaharju main BR duties 3: Sharing Business Register data with outside users

Oct Tuula Viitaharju Data dissemination as chargeable services tailor made statistics unit level data in standard form ad-hoc information services defining business populations according to customer wishes updating customer registers periodically, etc. mass data deliveries for further dissemination web based enterprise lists, business portals BR service database: monthly deliveries available of whole populations and all public variables

Oct Tuula Viitaharju Boundary condition for unit level data dissemination The Statistics Act includes specific provisions on the public data items of the Business Register, the list include:Statistics Act BI-code, name, postal address and code, telephone number Legal form, ownership, activity code, domicile, language Personnel, size class of personnel (local unit), size class of turnover Code of import or export Relationships of enterprise groups

Oct Tuula Viitaharju Problems of unit level data dissemination Confidentiality in large and small enterprises with large enterprises: threat of revealing sensitive information connected to competition with other enterprises with small enterprises (like farms etc): threat of revealing sensitive information connected to proximity of private and business life; family and enterprise mixed Not all enterprises are happy about data sharing, but only small minority is actually opposing

Oct Tuula Viitaharju How to manage the contradictions open administration, in general public base registers are widely accepted in Finland thanks to well known base register co-operation among Finnish administration (a special board) Statistic Act strictly regulates the list of public data the principles of unit level data dissemination are clearly told to respondents in survey letters and in Statistics Finland Internet pages

Oct Tuula Viitaharju Benefits of unit level data dissemination feedback from data users and enterprises themselves increased knowledge about BR and BR data quality route to disseminate NACE Rev 2 saving taxpayers money, co-operation helps whole administration release of local unit level data (BR is the only source that covers all sectors) – useful for regional organisations saving response burden

Oct Tuula Viitaharju Customers of outside services large private companies, banking and insurance sector research institutes, schools single researches public sector (government, ministries, regional planning and local organisations) private sector 70 %, public sector 30 % Customer relations in outside services BR service team, 4 persons Business Register Service GuideService Guide

Oct Tuula Viitaharju Statistics Finland’s Research Laboratory mainly for economic research purposes access to encrypted micro level data contain several data sets including Business Register data (enterprise, local units, enterprise groups) Remote on-line access under development

Oct Tuula Viitaharju Future plans

Oct Tuula Viitaharju The System of Economic Statistics International statistical system Environmental statistics Business statistics (STS, SBS) Labour statistics Government finance National accounts Foreign trade Prices and costs Other economic statistics Business register Economic statistics Science, technology, innovation Operating environment Social statistics

Oct Tuula Viitaharju Current strategic goals for Business Register globalisation - to cover MNEs and to operate in the EGR network means in improving coherence of economic statistics efficiency of production - the BR as a common frame of business statistics a more real time Business Register with interactive nature present data architecture originates from 1997

Oct Tuula Viitaharju Business Register redesign project Definition stage ongoing 2009 Goals to establish a data warehouse solution for business statistics to define interactive BR processes inside Statistics Finland to define well operating system for administrative data capture including metadata management to define changes in Business Register data content

Oct Tuula Viitaharju Thank you for your attention! Tuula Viitaharju Head, Business Register Statistics Finland tel: