1. 2.1 Coverage and units Regional Course on
Statistical Business Registers:
Making better use of administrative data
Tehran, Islamic Republic of Iran
10-13 December, 2017
2.1
Coverage and units

2. CONTENTS Part 1: Coverage of the SBR Coverage in theory
Coverage in practice
Part 2: Units in the SBR

3. What kinds of enterprises should be included in the SBR?
Coverage of the SBR
What kinds of enterprises should be included in the SBR?

4. COVERAGE OF THE SBR
In this session we will discuss coverage of the SBR in general. Coverage of specific survey frames will be discussed in later sessions.

5. THEORETICAL COVERAGE
In theory, SBRs should include all institutional units engaged in production according to the 2008 SNA production boundary. (This is of course unrealistic in practice.)

6. THEORETICAL COVERAGE This means the SBR should in theory include:
Market and non-market producers
Formal and informal enterprises
Employers and self-employed individuals
Certain extraterritorial organizations
Legal and illegal activities

7. MARKET AND NON-MARKET Market producers Non-market producers
Enterprises that sell all or most of their output at prices that are economically significant.
Non-market producers
Typically government units and non-profit institutions. Do not respond to economic changes in the same way as market producers.

8. MARKET AND NON-MARKET
The core coverage of SBRs consists of market producers. Ideally, non-market producers should be included as well, but their treatment is somewhat different.

9. “ INFORMAL ENTERPRISES
Different definitions exist for informal enterprises. The definition used in the UNECE Guidelines is:
The set of household enterprises that have market production but are not registered in the administrative source(s) on which the SBR is based. “

10. SELF-EMPLOYED INDIVIDUALS
Self-employed individuals do not have employees - in other words, they are one-person enterprises. They play an important role in several ISIC sections, including M - Professional, scientific and technical activities.

11. EXTRATERRITORIAL ORGANIZATIONS
There are two types of extraterritorial organizations:
Those that are included in other countries’ economic territories (e.g., embassies and consulates)
Those that are not included in other countries’ economic territories (e.g., UN bodies and other international organizations)
Only the second type should be included in the SBR

12. COVERAGE IN PRACTICE
In practice, SBR coverage will be highly dependent on the data available from administrative sources. Since coverage of some types of enterprises is unrealistic, recommended coverage of the SBR is narrower.

13. RECOMMENDED COVERAGE
The decision to include enterprises in the SBR in practice comes down to a trade off between:
The cost of acquiring data on that type of enterprise
How important that type of enterprise is in the national economy
At a minimum, economically important enterprise types that are recorded in administrative data sources should be included in the SBR.

14. RECOMMENDED COVERAGE The UNECE Guidelines recommend inclusion of:
All formal sector enterprises
Informal sector enterprises if administrative sources are available (which is very rare)
The Guidelines do not recommend including household non-market enterprises. If these are a significant part of the national economy, they can be covered with household-enterprise surveys.

15. RECOMMENDED COVERAGE Government Financial corporations Enterprises
in the formal sector
Non-financial corporations
Non-profit institutions serving households
Registered household enterprises
All enterprises
Non-registered
agricultural enterprises
(own-account and employers)
Include
Household enterprises in the informal sector
Non-registered non-agricultural enterprises (own-account and employers)
Include if admin
source available
Exclude
Household non-market enterprises

16. UNDERCOVERED ENTERPRISES
Some of the kinds of enterprises that are often undercovered (or do not exist at all) in the SBR are:
Self-employed professionals
Other small enterprises
Enterprises in the informal sector
Extraterritorial organizations

17. MODULAR APPROACH
The Guidelines stress the importance of a modular approach to SBR design, by which important and easy-to-include enterprises are focused on first and more units are added incrementally.

18. COMPLETENESS AND CONTENT
Two terms are used to discuss different aspects of coverage: completeness and content.

19. COMPLETENESS AND CONTENT
The extent to which the SBR includes all institutional units within the 2008 SNA production boundary.
Content
The set of characteristics of the units contained in the SBR.

20. UNSD SBR SURVEY RESULTS
In 2013, the United Nations Statistics Division conducted a Global Assessment Survey on the current status of SBRs. The following are some results related to coverage of countries’ SBRs.

21. UNSD SBR SURVEY RESULTS

22. UNSD SBR SURVEY RESULTS

23. UNSD SBR SURVEY RESULTS
Many countries do not cover ISIC sections:
T - Activities of households as employers; undifferentiated goods- and services-producing activities of households for own use
U - Activities of extraterritorial organizations and bodies

24. UNSD SBR SURVEY RESULTS
The most common threshold used was the employment of one person

25. The division of businesses for statistical purposes
Units in the SBR
The division
of businesses for statistical purposes

26. UNITS IN THE SBR
Units can be thought of as the different-sized pieces businesses are divided up into for different purposes.

27. CATEGORIES OF UNITS There are three main categories of units:
Statistical units
Legal, administrative and operational units
Observation and reporting units

28. “ STATISTICAL UNITS Statistical units are:
Units defined for statistical purposes, for which information is sought and for which statistics are compiled “

29. LEGAL, ADMINISTRATIVE AND OPERATIONAL UNITS
Recognized by law or society, independent of the persons or institutions that own it
Administrative
Defined by a legal unit for purposes of conforming with an administrative regulation (for example, reporting units for accounting or taxation)
Operational
Defined by a legal unit for purposes of organising itself, for example a division, branch, workshop, warehouse or outlet. “ “ “
These are the basis for creating and maintaining statistical units

30. OBSERVATION AND REPORTING UNITS
The units about which data are actually obtained during the course of surveys
Reporting
The units from which data are actually obtained “ “

31. OBSERVATION AND REPORTING UNITS
These units are often the same but may be different for large and complex enterprises where the point of contact for a survey is a different unit from the unit the survey is collecting information about - or if an accounting business reports on behalf of a client business

32. TYPES OF STATISTICAL UNITS
The main three types of statistical units are:
Enterprise groups
Enterprises
Establishments, or local kind of activity units
Other common statistical units are:
Kind-of-activity units
Local units

33. ENTERPRISES
These are the basic statistical units. They are made up of one or more legal units. According to SNA 2008, they are:
The level of statistical unit at which all information relating to transactions, including financial and balance sheet accounts, are maintained “

34. ENTERPRISES
Lower-level statistical units are derived by partitioning enterprises into smaller pieces:
Establishments are the result of partitioning enterprises by location and kind of activity
Local units are the result of partitioning enterprises by location
Kind of activity units are the result of partitioning enterprises by kind of activity

35. ENTERPRISE GROUPS
These are defined when there is a control relation between legal units. The concept was created to deal with large conglomerates.
Truncated enterprise groups are defined as only the part of a multinational enterprise group that resides in the country/territory
All-resident enterprise groups are defined as enterprise groups that reside entirely within a country/territory

36. ENTERPRISE GROUPS
With large and complex enterprise groups, it is sometimes necessary to communicate more intensively with senior staff of the enterprise group to determine how to break it down into smaller units. This is profiling, which we will discuss in more detail on Tuesday.

37. UNITS OF SIMPLE BUSINESSES
For simple businesses that do not belong to an enterprise group, there may only be one entity, which is the enterprise, the establishment, the observation unit and the reporting unit.

38. RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN UNITS
Diagram from the Working Paper on Statistical Business Registers, UNSD and Eurostat

39. UNSD SBR SURVEY RESULTS

40. REFERENCES
This presentation was primarily based on UNECE’s Guidelines on Statistical Business Registers, in particular Chapters 3 and 4. Other material used:
The African Development Bank’s Guidelines for Building Statistical Business Registers in Africa
Eurostat’s Business registers: Recommendations manual
UNSD’s Report on global status of statistical business register systems
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