1. Business Surveys: Past, Present, and Challenges for the Future 1 Rob Edwards Director Statistics Department 1 Presentation to the Third International Conference on Establishment Surveys, Montreal, Canada, June 18, 2007

2. Disclaimer and Acknowledgements The views expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the IMF or IMF policy. Special thanks to colleagues in the IMF Statistics Department (especially Lucie Laliberté and Rob Dippelsman) and former colleagues at the Australian Bureau of Statistics (especially Peter Harper and Frank Yu) for helpful inputs.

3. IMF Statistics Department Mission: “The availability of high-quality statistics is an essential prerequisite for the formulation of appropriate macroeconomic and financial policies. The Statistics Department provides strong leadership for the development and application of sound statistical practices in the IMF, in member countries, and in the international statistical community at large. In this endeavor, the Department plays a pivotal role in the development of internationally accepted methodologies and standards, provides technical assistance and training to promote the adoption of these standards, and models best practices in the dissemination of economic and financial statistics”

4. Functional Organization for Economic Statistics in the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) Providers Dispatch, collection and intensive follow up Economic Statistics Data Centre Responsible for pre-input editing functions for all business collections Business Statistics Centres Responsible for production of regular ABS outputs National Statistical Centres Responsible for statistical leadership Users Input editing Regular outputs Strategic relationships Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics

5. The ABS Input Data Warehouse in the Context of the Overall Business Surveys Processing Environment Source: ABS

6. The ABS Business End-to-End Processing Environment Source: Australian Bureau of Statistics

7. Future Challenges Conceptual Issues Changes in business financial reporting Increasing importance of multinational corporations Data reporting more generally