1. ESSnet on Consistency Workshop Gresham Hotel, Dublin, 24th and 25th of April 2012
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

2. The Statistical Business Register Role and Place in Economic Business Statistics
Dublin Workshop ESSnet on Consistency
24-25 April 2012
Jean Ritzen
Statistics Netherlands

3. Outline Introduction Modeling society: several and different views
Why and what is a business register
Difference between an administrative BR and a statistical BR (administrative: instruments for control and governance)
Basic content and requirements of SBR
Goals and uses in statistics
Challenges
Some figures
A look into the future
Discussion
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

4. Modeling Society, what does it mean?
Social order
Social structure
Social processes
Several and different views
e.g. economic view
Economic order
Economic structure
Economic processes
Economic
Statistics
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

5. Economic Statistics  actor based
Economic (institutional) statistics describe economic actors and processes within and between actors.
Conceptual frames:
System of National Accounts (SNA)
European System of Accounts (ESA)
Describing:
Types and definitions of entities (economic/statistical units)
Types and definitions of transactions/flows between entities
Classifications to be distinguished and applied
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

6. Economic Statistics
Operational infrastructural frames and metadata systems
Population (survey) frames
Business (survey) frames
Institutional sector classification
Industrial classification (kind of activities)
Classification of changes
Definitions of entities/units
Definitions of terms
Size-classifications (turnover/employment)
Other, e.g. editing and processing rules
Coherency required
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

7. Business (Survey) Frames
Most known and important one for system of business statistics:
Statistical Business Register:
A full and comprehensive list of all entities, institutionally and formally involved in production and financing processes of the economy to facilitate and support the collection of statistical data and the compilation and dissemination of statistical information.
The entities are standardized according the operational frame of definitions of appropriate units.
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

8. Statistical Business Register (1)
The Statistical Business Register (SBR) is the basic infrastructural backbone in the system of economic statistics:
Population frame for business statistics
List of units and characteristics
Rules and procedures for co-ordination of statistics
Instrument to reach consistency in and between statistics
Basic reference information
Part of surveying methodology
Sampling procedures and grossing up procedures
Frame/tool for survey management and survey control
Frame/tool for control of administrative burden
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

9. Statistical Business Register (2)
More complex than a register of natural persons and/or households because of the many ways units manifest themselves in the real world, e.g. many kinds of legal forms and ways of being organized.
Need for standardization into (objective) statistical units:
Enterprise group
Enterprise
Local unit
Statistical units appropriate for registration
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

10. Legal/Administrative vs. Economic/statistical
Legal/administrative organization of society:
The way of creation of entities and rules in order to perform optimally according goals. Regulatory and executive institutes (e.g. tax-offices) keep lists for own purposes. Focus is on governance and control with orientation on individual persons and/or institutions.
Organization is according national legislation.
Economic/statistical approach via standardization into standard concepts of units, independent of national legislation and/or administration (in principle). Individual information in context of groups. No direct repercussions on individuals.
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

11. The SBR model Domestic Legal or natural person Enterprise
Economic/statistical world
Legal/administrative world
(Domestic)
Enterprise group
Local (legal) person
Enterprise
Local unit
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

12. SBR: Related EU Regulations
For standardization in European Union:
Regulation on statistical units
Regulation on business registers
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

13. SBR: units and main characteristics
Legal unit
Local legal unit
Enterprise group
Enterprise
Local Unit
Time
stamp
Source key x
SBR ID Number
Control/ownership
Legal form
SNA-sector-code
SIC-code(s)
Size-class-code(s)
Change code
(x)
GEO-code
(Survey-codes x)
Date of entry
Date of birth
Date of death
Date of deregister
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

14. Some characteristics explained
SNA-sector-code
Institutional sector
SIC-code
ISIC, NACE, NAICS, ANZIC, National codes
Regards main activities and secundary activities
Size-class
Persons employed, employees, turnover
Change-code
Kind of change in relation to continuity; control of events
GEO-code
Adress-code, postal code, province, municipality, grid
Survey code
Indicates the survey in which the unit is involved
Time stamp : date of registation;, date of start applying; date of checking; date of end of applying
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

15. Classification of changes (events)*
* According Ad Willeboordse and Peter Struijs: paper presented at ICES-I, 1993
** Number of units before and after the change: x>1, y>1.
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

16. SBR: Sources and maintenance
Administrative sources (as much as useful available): tax, chambers of commerce, courts, social security (NB: avoid capriciousness!) Highly automated procedures and processing
Feed-back information from statistical surveys
Register-surveys
Profiling: tailor-made analysis of large businesses (internet, annual reports, visits, …)
Dun & Bradstreet
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

17. SBR: Update-procedure administrative sources
Tax
Social security
Chambers of commerce
Other
Administrative
Environment (units)
Statistical
Enterprise group
Enterprise
Local unit
Standardized/ normalized
(Local) Legal Unit
Auxiliary environment
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

18. SBR: Update-procedure with administrative sources
Tax
Social security
Chambers of commerce
Other
Administrative
Environment (units)
Statistical
Enterprise group
Enterprise
Local unit
Standardized/ normalized
(Local) Legal Unit
Auxiliary environment
2,1 mln
1,1 mln
1,2 mln
1,3 mln
2,0 mln
Figurs in the Dutch SBR-system at th end of 2010
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

19. Statistical Business Register ≠Statistical Database
List of units with their characteristics as sample frame
Statistical Database: Database with data for publishing or dissemination statistical data
Different requirements
Statistical data on enterprises are based on statistical analysis of data in the register. Corrections may still be necessary, possibly using a quality survey or using the confrontation and comparison of more sources
 e.g. Economic demography/Business demography
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

20. SBR: main (possible) uses
Business survey frame
Stratified sampling (selection of units)
Survey dispatch (names/addresses) and tool for survey management/control
Instrument facilitating use of data in administrative registers for statistics (frame for standardization and normalization)
Burden control + monitoring
Frame for co-ordination statistics
Comparability in time and over time
Comparability between (sub)populations
Control of continuity
Statistical analysis
Economic demography
Small area analysis
Internationally
Comparability of statistics of different countries, contemporary and in time series
Analysis of globalization
Selling lists
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

21. Business register and economic statistics
Place and Role of the statistical business register are very important to serve and support statistical processes.
Business register is part of economic-statistics-system and has evolved to a business register system with subsystems.
Statement:
“Statistics are in the business register!”
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

22. Important stakeholders and users of the SBR
All producers of economic statistics, among which:
Short term statistics (STS)
Yearly structural business statistics (SBS) (Production statistics and including business demography)
Statistic of Balance Sheets (Financial statistics)
National Accounts (NA), which are the last chain and for the compilation of these the outputs of the short term statistics and production statistics are used as the main inputs.
FATS (Foreign Affiliate Statistics)
FDI (Foreign Direct Investment statistics)
Statistics on (un)employment
Price statistics
The SBR is the first chain in the chain of Economic Statistics (SBR  STS  SBS  NA). Because of the use of the same basic infrastructure (BR) and of the same coordinated definitions, all chains will be coherent and consistent to each other
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

23. Population selection from Statistical Business Register
To reach well coordinated statistics resulting in consistency in and over time, selection criterions must be defined very precisely:
Which units (enterprise/Kind of activity unit)
Which activity category in terms of activity classification
Which size classes
Which copy of the SBR
Which unit situation (according date stamps for unit and characteristics)
Only if all selection criterions are identical in the selection for different surveys, the results of these surveys can be compared to each other and are consistent. The same strict requirements are for international comparison of figures.
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

24. SBR: main challenges
Meeting traditional goals and purposes in a more efficient and more effective way (e.g. development of automatic coding systems)
Efficient use of administrative sources
Normalization tool in the use of administrative data for statistics: translation from administrative, legal based, concepts into statistical concepts
Dealing with imperfections and frame errors
International comparability of statistical data starting with harmonized SBR-concepts
Support of continuity analyses (e.g. from changes in classifications)
Improvement of quality
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

25. SBR: Quality indicators
Coverage (overcoverage (% duplications) and undercoverage)
Completeness/exhaustiveness
Actuality, timeliness
Percentage errors (all variables)
Effectiveness of use available administrative information
Rate of disclosure administrative data
Fitness for use
System-integrity (consistency)
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

26. Important SBR issues Awareness on:
Restricted available budgets and resources
Necessity of use administrative sources
Budget
Timeliness
Response burden
Importance of support in revisions of classifications (e.g. introduction of the 2008 NACE rev.2)
Common responsibility for quality of statistics
Continuity in sources
Reconstructible frames (using time-stamping)
Need for good relationships with stakeholders and statistical users  management of relationships
Need for good relationships with administrative sources, resulting in possibilities to influence content
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

27. Important SBR development issues
Expanding goals and uses internationally:
Multinational enterprises
Globalization
Supranational statistics
Further imbedding SBR-system in system of economic statistics
Expanding statistical use of the SBR
Further development of BR as a tool to relate “cloud”-information to the standardised actors (statistical units)
Continuous improvement of management of relationships with statistical stakeholders and users
Strengthen relationships with administrative sources
Further imbedding of the SBR in the total information system of the society
Further development of quality control
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

28. SBR maintenance strategy
Top 350 Enterprise groups: active profiling by staff  full manual update on regular basis This is be done in a special organisational unit that is also responsible for consistency of statistical data collected at these units.
Next 2000 large enterprise groups: reactive “profiling”, based on signals from system or because of special reason Manual updates by BR staff, non regular.
Other units (mainly small or medium sized): Full automated procedures using source data, coming in on a daily basis (from trade register and tax administration)
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

29. Profiling method for large units
Definition of profiling:
Profiling is a method to analyse the legal, operational and accounting structure of an enterprise group at global and national level, in order to establish the statistical units within that group, their links, and the most efficient structures for the collection of statistical data.
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

30. Enterprise Group + Enterprise profile
Operational segment 1
Operational segment 2
Ent 1
Ent3
Ent 2
Cluster of legal units under common control
Enterprise
Group
Operational segment 1
Operational segment 2
Enterprises
Enterprise 1
Enterprise 2
Enterprise3
Operational segments are for analytical purposes but are not statistical units
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

31. “Profiling” Results in Dutch SBR 2005
legal units enterprise groups enterprises
20 – 29  
30 – 39  
40 – 59  
60 – 99  
100 and more  
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

32. Redesign of the chain of economic statistics (1)
Statistics Netherlands has recently given emphasis to two very important goals:
Improvement of efficiency (doing the work with less staff)
(Further) Reduction of administrative burden at enterprises
Under the conditions:
Compilation of the same or of more statistical outputs .
Keeping at least the same quality
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

33. Redesign of the chain of economic statistics (2)
The ways the goals are achieved are:
Redesign of the whole chain of economic statistics, from BR to National Accounts
Improved tuning of the several stages in the compilation of statistics (data collection, data-editing, data processing)
More use of data available in administrative registers for the compilation of economic statistics
Creation of an increased size of automated procedures.
Change of the organisation at Statistics Netherlands
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

34. Redesign of the chain of economic statistics (3)
In the redesign project some important changes are introduced and some additional tools are being developed in the BR area.
The delineation of the statistical units is being improved because of the availability of additional information on interdependencies of legal units (information on control, coming from the tax registers)
The development of tools for combining data of different administrative sources according the statistical units
In practise, the delineation of the enterprise unit is being improved, what resulted in many more enterprise units as a combination of legal units under common control, see the next BR diagrams
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

35. Redesign of the chain of economic statistics (4)
Domestic Legal or natural person
Economic/statistical world
Legal/administrative world
(Domestic)
Enterprise group
Local (legal) person
Enterprise
Local unit
Statistical units model:
Less splitt offs into more Enterprises
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

36. Redesign of the chain of economic statistics (5)
Or in the bottom up model :
Domestic Legal or natural person
Economic/statistical world
Legal/administrative world
(Domestic)
Enterprise group
Local (legal) person
Enterprise
Local unit
More
combinations
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

37. Some register figures (1)
Increase and decrease of the numbers must be explained, see arrow. Possible reasons: - real changes - change in definitions or processes - change in coverage by sources
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

38. Some register figures (2)
Total monthly events to be processed in the BR is about
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

39. Some register figures (3)
Knowledge on changes in sample frames is very important for survey statisticians
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

40. A look into the future Legal/administrative world (global)
Economic/statistical
world (global)
Economic/statistical
world (sub-global)
Legal/administrative
world (sub-global)
Legal Unit
Global Enterprise group
Truncated Enterprise group
Legal or operational unit (sub global)
Global Enterprise
SPE
SPE
Truncated Enterprise
Local unit legal or operational
Local (legal) unit
Local unit
Local unit
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012

41. Thank you for your attention
Questions? =>
Dublin Workshop ESSnet Consistency April 2012