Statistical Sources

The Structural Business Statistics (SBS) data are collected through statistical surveys, from the business register or from administrative sources. National Statistical Institutes (NSIs) can use one or several of these sources, according to the survey strategy they have adopted, taking into account the costs, the quality and the response burden on enterprises.

• Statistical surveys: the NSI sends questionnaires to the enterprises or local units surveyed. They send these questionnaires either to all enterprises (exhaustive survey) or to a sample of enterprises. Very often, samples are used for smaller enterprises while large enterprises are all surveyed. This is called stratified sampling with an inclusion probability depending on size of the unit.
• Administrative sources: they are typically maintained by the tax and social security authorities. They are used as a source by the NSI to comply with the SBS regulation requirements. Administrative sources have the advantage of reducing the response burden on enterprises; however, in most cases they don't contain all variables required. Moreover, the parameters sampled generally don't coincide exactly with the definition of the statistical characteristics they are used as a proxy of. For more information, please refer to § 5.1.20 of the Business Register Section of the Eurostat Manual of Business Statistics.
• Business register: it provides the information that can be used for the SBS data collection (number of enterprises) and contains some basic characteristics (NACE activity code, employment, turnover) used for sample stratification, for inference or for calibration. Interested readers will find extra information in the Business Register Section (Chapter 5 of the first Section) of the Eurostat Manual of Business Statistics.

Recent and detailed information on the statistical system and the SBS survey strategy of individual member states (MS), candidate countries (CC) or European Economic Area countries (NO, CH) is available.

Last update: 3 July 2006