Statistical Finland

Economic Statistics

FI-00022 Statistics Finland

Structural business statistics (SBS) describes the structure, conduct and performance of economic activities, down to the most detailed activity level (several hundred economic sectors). SBS covers all activities of the business economy with the exception of agricultural activities, public administration and (largely) non-market services such as education and health. Main characteristics (variables) of the SBS data category:

• Business demographic variables (e.g. Number of active enterprises)

• "Output related" variables (e.g. Net turnover, Value added)

• "Input related" variables: labour input (e.g. Number of employees and self-employed persons, Hours worked by employees); goods and services input (e.g. Purchases of goods and services); capital input (e.g. Gross investments)

Nationally published data includes additionally some information of agriculture, forestry and fishing indutries and activities of membership organisations. Some variables published on Eurostat's database are not published nationally ( e.g. Purchases of goods and services). Nationally published data includes also balance sheet variables and other variables from the financial statements.

Business services statistics (BS) collection contains harmonised statistics on business services. From 2008 onwards BS become part of the regular mandatory annual data collection of SBS. The BS’s data requirement includes variable “Turnover” broken down by products and by type of residence of client.

Nationally published BS statistics contain data on the breakdown of turnover by product category in accordance with the CPA product classification (Classification of Products by Activity) and possible sales to households BtoC (i.e. private customers) and business customers BtoB.

The annual regional statistics collection includes three characteristics due by NUTS-2 country region and detailed on NACE Rev 2division level (2-digits).

Statistical Classification of Economic Activities in the European Community (NACE):  NACE Rev.2 is used from 2008 onwards. Key data were double reported in NACE Rev.1.1 and NACE Rev.2 only for 2008. From 2002 to 2007 NACE Rev. 1.1 was used and until 2001 NACE Rev.1

The regional breakdown of the EU Member States is based on the Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics (NUTS). 

The product breakdown is based on the Classification of Products by Activity (CPA) as stated in the Regulation establishing CPA 2008 and its amending  Commission Regulation (EU) No 1209/2014  (from reference year 2015 onwards).

Starting reference year 2021 onwards SBS cover the economic activities of market producers within the NACE Rev. 2 Sections B to N, P to R and Divisions S95 and S96.
Until 2007 the SBS coverage was limited to Sections C to K of NACE Rev.1.1 and from the reference year 2008 to 2020 data was available for Sections B to N and Division S95 of NACE Rev.2.
From 2013, as the first reference year, to 2020 information is published on NACE codes K6411, K6419 and K65 and its breakdown.

Nationally published data includes also some information of the market producers within the NACE Rev. 2 Sections A and Division S94.

From 2008 reference year data collection BS covers NACE Rev 2 codes: J62, N78, J582, J631, M731, M691, M692, M702, M712, M732, M7111, and M7112.

SBS constitutes an important and integrated part of the new European Business Statistics Regulation N° 2152/2019

Data requirements, simplifications and technical definitions are definied in Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2020/1197

Data is collected from legal units and local units but statistical unit used is enterprise and for regional data local unit. Most of the legal units are identical with an enterprise. Nationally data is published also for legal units.

Data from the statistics on service industry commodities are published on the basis of legal units. The data are sent to Eurostat based on enterprise units.

All market producer on all Nace sections are covered in national statistics. Data published by Eurostat includes NACE Rev. 2 Sections B to N, P to R and Divisions S95 and S96. 

The statistical population is taken from the business register.

Branches of foreign enterprises are included in the data if the branches are registered in Finland. The data also cover activities outside Finland that are included in the enterprise’s financial statements produced in Finland. Thus, the turnover described in the statistics may also include goods sent abroad for processing and sales of goods and services from abroad to abroad. However the most significant branches abroad have been eliminated from the statistics.

Finland (including NUTS and Åland)

Based on legal units: 1996 – 2021
Changes in NACE classification caused discontinuity in the time-series in years 2002 and 2008. Also methods and renewal of statistical units caused discontinuity in the time-series in years 2013 and 2021.
Based on enterprise units: 2017-2021
Changes in the definitions of the statistical units and the number of employees and self-employed persons caused a discontinuity in the time series between years 2020 and 2021.

Annual data on the statistics on business services are available on the home page of the statistics and in Statistics Finland's StatFin database starting from 2008. The statistical population for national statistics on business services was changed to cover all enterprises in connection with the statistical reference year 2020 and the population is no longer limited to enterprises with 5 or 20 employees depending on the industry. For Eurostat the data for business services includes only enterprises with at least 20 employees. Comparable timeseries for business services data sent to Eurostat is from 2020 onwards. From this year the turnover data has been better in coherence with SBS data because of the use of consolidated turnover in business services.  Also the division of the turnover data by residence of client has been estimated using administrative data instead of survey data.

Not applicable.

• Number of enterprises and number of local units are expressed in units.

• Monetary data are expressed in millions of €.

• Employment variables are expressed in units.

• Per head values are expressed in thousands of € per head. 

Ratios are expressed in percentages.

2021

The data refers to fiscal year.

The different financial years are converted to correspond to the statistical year.

Starting with reference year 2021 two new regulations currently form the legal basis of SBS:

• Regulation (EU) 2019/2152 repealing 10 legal acts in the field of business statistics (EBS Regulation), and
• Commission Implementing Regulation (EU) 2020/1197 laying down technical specifications and arrangements (general implementing act) pursuant to Regulation (EU) 2019/2152

Year 1995 was the first year for the implementation of the Council Regulation No 58/97 (SBS Regulation).

The Council Regulation No 58/97 has been amended three times: by Council Regulation No 410/98, Commission Regulation No 1614/2002 and European Parliament and Council Regulation No 2056/2002. As a new amendment of the basic Regulation it was decided to recast the Regulation No 58/97 in order to obtain a new "clean" legal text. In 2008 the European Parliament and Council adopted Regulation No 295/2008 and the provisions of this Regulation were applicable from the reference year 2008 to reference year 2020. Regulation No 295/2008 was amended by Commission Regulation (EU) No 446/2014.

National statistical law.

Not applicable.

Confidentiality policy is based on the basic statistical law.
The statistical authority shall not disclose information that allows the statistical unit to be identified directly.

Confidentiality rules
Primary: If a cell contains less than 3 observations or if there are dominating enterprises.
Secondary: Flagging cells so that the least amount of data is lost.

Software used: TauArgus.

There are no plans/no possibility to reduce the confidentiality.

We have national release calendar: https://www.stat.fi/en/future-releases

Structural business and financial statement statistics:
https://stat.fi/en/statistics/yrti#calendar
Regional statistics on entrepreneurial activity:
https://stat.fi/en/statistics/alyr#calendar

Business services statistics:

https://stat.fi/en/statistics/palhy#calendar

Tailored statistics are available for charge.

Annual.

Structural business and financial statement statistics: https://stat.fi/en/statistics/yrti#pastPublications (two times a year)

Regional statistics on entrepreneurial activity: https://stat.fi/en/statistics/alyr#pastPublications (once a year)

Business services statistics: https://stat.fi/en/statistics/palhy#pastPublications (once a year)

Printed publications: Statistical yearbook

Electronic publications:
Structural business and financial statement statistics:

https://stat.fi/en/statistics/yrti#pastPublications

Regional statistics on entrepreneurial activity:

https://stat.fi/en/statistics/alyr#pastPublications

Business services statistics:

https://stat.fi/en/statistics/palhy#pastPublications

The publications are available in Finnish, Swedish and English

The national on-line database.

Two times a year:

Structural business and financial statement statistics: https://pxdata.stat.fi/PXWeb/pxweb/en/StatFin/StatFin__yrti/?tablelist=true

Once a year:

Regional statistics on entrepreneurial activity: https://pxdata.stat.fi/PXWeb/pxweb/en/StatFin/StatFin__alyr/?tablelist=true

Once a year:

Business services statistics: 

https://pxdata.stat.fi/PXWeb/pxweb/en/StatFin/StatFin__palhy/?tablelist=true

Only available for researchers with license

The data are sent to Eurostat, either to be used in European aggregates or to be released also as national data.

Structural business and financial statement statistics:

https://stat.fi/en/statistics/documentation/yrti (available in finnish, swedish and english)

Regional statistics on entrepreneurial activity:

https://stat.fi/en/statistics/documentation/alyr (available in finnish, swedish and english)

Business services statistics:

https://stat.fi/en/statistics/documentation/palhy  (available in finnish, swedish and english)

Structural business and financial statement statistics:

https://stat.fi/en/statistics/documentation/yrti (available in finnish, swedish and english)

 Regional statistics on entrepreneurial activity:

https://stat.fi/en/statistics/documentation/alyr (available in finnish, swedish and english)

Business services statistics:

https://stat.fi/en/statistics/documentation/palhy (available in finnish, swedish and english)

Specific tool (Edamis) maintained by Eurostat for validation of SBS-series. All enterprises go through automatic data validation and enterprises with biggest errors are manually corrected. Also biggest companies are manually checked.

The quality management framework of the field of statistics is the European Statistics Code of Practice (CoP). The quality criteria of Official Statistics of Finland are compatible with the European Statistics Code of Practice. Further information: Quality management | Statistics Finland (stat.fi)

The quality of the structural business and financial statement statistics is examined as the data accumulate. At aggregate level, the data are compared with the previous year and the most significant changes are examined. Coherence analyses to short term statistics are also carried out.

We have comprehensive administrative data at our disposal, thus the accuracy is mostly good. Relevance of the statistic is good. If any relevant data is missing it can be ordered for charge. Timeliness is better than in most European countries: the preliminary data is published within 9 months and final data within 12 months. Coherence with other statistics is good. We use same data base with other business statistics and NA.

The top management of SF has made several self-assessments in line with the EFQM model. There have also been external audits by e.g. the EU and IMF experts. Processes are in place to monitor the quality of the statistical process and the processes of individual statistics. Quality considerations are an integral part of the planning and evaluation of the statistical programme.
The process owner of statistical production and it’s supporting group monitor the quality and steer the standardisation of work processes.
Statistics Finland has an internal quality audit system. The main objectives are to evaluate the ways of working, methods and techniques. An audit is carried out by an audit team of experts who are external in the sense that they do not have any direct connection with the production process in question.
About 8 audits are carried out yearly.

Main users of the data are
Internal: Other departments in our institution (national accounts), Researchers, Enterprises/businesses, Media, Minstries etc.
External: Eurostat
SBS data published at national level is partly different from the data sent to Eurostat.
Enterprise size classifications is different due to different definition of the number of employees (measured in FTE in national statistics). KAU-level statistics are not published. Regional level of breakdown is different, as we publish the data at more detailed regional level instead of NUTS. Special aggregates are not published. Variable value of production is not published at enterprise level but rather at local level. Variable concerning investment is published nationally as net investment instead of gross investment.

We provide additional variables based on balance sheet information and other financial statement variables. Nationally published data includes also some information of the market producers within the NACE Rev. 2 Sections A and Division S94.

For the Business Services data sent to Eurostat, the threshold of 20 persons employed is applied. For domestic dissemination a threshold of 5 or 20 persons employed is used depending on Nace branch. The reason for this is that the threshold of 20 excludes a significant proportion of turnover in some branches. Our aim is to cover at least 80% of turnover for each branch by bringing the threshold down to 5 persons when necessary.

Co-operation between SF and important users with regard to the relevance of statistics and the users’ needs consists of an extensive feedback system and co-operative working groups with the main users, such as users of national accounts. There are regular meetings of SF directors and experts with the users, even at the senior management level. Users are usually also invited to participate in discussions concerning the establishment of new statistics or revisions of existing ones.In addition, there are specific feedback systems for receiving the users’ opinions at SF. These systems consist of an anonymous feedback channel on the web, media monitoring, surveys among different user groups for the evaluation of SF’s performance, user surveys (every second year, latest in 2015), and a system for collecting and disseminating information that is strategically important for SF. Specific statistical products conduct their own user surveys and keep in regular contact with their main interest groups.

We are providing all the relevant data required by SBS regulations.

The main source of errors is non-response. The preliminary results are not biased. The first release of the results is three months before the final release.

Not relevant because total data is available for variables. Sampling is made only for some more detailed variables.

The influence of non-sampling error is small. The unit non-response are imputed based on lst years data or nearest neighbour with distance measure. In Business Services data unit non-response is taken into account by grossing up the data. 

The recorded unit non-response rate: Low

The bias of the estimate: Small bias

Coverage error: Almost none

Out of scope units: For the reference year 2021 the business Register annual Quality Control Survey covered 1417 legal units. The response rate was 61,5 percent. Based on the survey results 3 percent were found to be misclassified (5-digit level).

The statistics on Business Services do not describe service production comprehensively due to the employee limitations of the respondent group. The product distributions of enterprises in the stratum with the smallest number of employees but fewer than five persons and not belonging to the inquiry group may differ from the product distributions of enterprises belonging to the respondent group of the stratum, and this may cause inaccuracy in the estimated product distribution of the industry if the turnover of these enterprises accounts for a large share of the industry's turnover.

A significant factor affecting the reliability of the Business Services statistics is the ability of the respondents to break down turnover according to the CPA classification. Efforts have been made to manage this risk by specifying the classification and the descriptions of the categories.

National level / statistical year 2021

Data-collection deadline 11/2022

Dissemination deadline 9/2022 (preliminary data)
Dissemination deadline 12/2022 (final data)

Data transmitted on time.

Fully comparable geographically

Length of comparable time series: 2021
For business services data: 2020-2021

Statistical Finland has renewed and harmonized the statistical units used in SBS, IFATS and BD statistics from year 2021 onwards. Limitations concerning the operating time and size of enterprises have been removed from the definition of statistical units. Previously, only enterprises having operated for at least six months in the statistical reference year and whose turnover, number of personnel, investments or balance sheet exceeded the statistical limit were included in the statistics. The statistics now include all market-based enterprises that have had turnover, personnel, other operating income, investments, or balance sheet during the statistical reference year. The total number of enterprises will increase by around 50 per cent. But the effect of the new statistical units on variables other than the number of enterprises is mainly quite marginal. The new statistical units increased the turnover of the statistics as a whole by under 0.5 per cent. The data calculated with the new statistical units is available on Statistics Finlands data base from 2018 onwards.

The data on the number of personnel in the statistics have been calculated with a new method from year 2021 onwards. The renewal decreases the number of personnel in FTE by around 136 000 persons (9,0 %) calculated with data for 2020. There is no back-casted data for the new estimates.

A comparable time series on the statistics on service industry commodities is nationally available for the time period 2008 to 2019. The statistical population in national statistics was changed to cover all enterprises in connection with the statistical reference year 2020 and the population is no longer limited to enterprises with 5 or 20 employees depending on the industry. Turnover data are not collected with the CPA classification in other sources. Comparable timeseries for business services data sent to Eurostat is from 2020 onwards. From this year the turnover data has been better estimated in coherence with SBS data because of the use of consolidated turnover in business services. Also the division of the turnover data by residence of client has been estimated using administrative data instead of survey data.

- Number of enterprises, number of persons employed, number of employees in Business register

- Number of enterprises, number of persons employed, number of employees in Business demography

- Production value of Prodcom

- Value added of national account

- Evolution of turnover and persons employed from short term statistics

- Business services (turnover in table 23 of GIA)

The inconsistencies are evaluated and corrected as part of the manual editing process of statistics.

Description of coherence:

Coherence between Business register, BD, Business services and SBS is good. Between other statistics especially short term statistics there are partly uncoherence.

Explanation of differences:

Differences are caused by differences in statistical target population, differences in statistical units and differences in calculation of the variable (e.g. value added in NA). 

The aggregates are always consistent with their main sub-aggregates

We use administrative data for most of SBS variables.

We did a burden measuring survey for enterprises who are part of our financial statement survey in 2018:

900 enterprises answered
the average time spent to answer was 188 minutes (median was 120 minutes)
29 % of the enterprises answering to the survey used over 3 hours to answer
55 % thought that the survey was very burdensome

Different versions of administrative data cause revisions. In general revisions are small/moderate if compared to the known use of data. Revisions to the data after the final dissemination are made only if major error are found.

The methodology is the same for the preliminary data as the final data. All the revisions are due to revised source data.

Type of source

For the compilation of the Structural Business Statistics following source datas are used: Business register, a direct inquiry, Financial supervisory authority, VAT data and Tax Authority administrative data. Administrative data from Tax Administration provides financial statements data for all enterprises (main source). The BR provides information on principal activity and number of personnel.
The direct inquiry for other than Business Services data is a census which covers all enterprises with more than 60 employees. Some enterprises with more than 10 employees are also included in sample survey. The direct inquiry data are mainly collected for the national data needs (more detailed data on certain variables/items for the calculation of national accounts)

- any possible threshold values: not applicable
- the effective sample size is 5500

- the used administrative sources: Income tax data from tax authorities, Financial supervisory authority data, VAT data and Business register
- the characteristics directly available or with good proxy in the administrative source: 210101, 310101, 250101, 250301, 250401, 250501, 240101, 240203, 240202, 240201, 220302, 320301, 220303, 220301, 260102, 260104, 260105, 260101, 260108, 220101, 320101, 220102, 220103, 220201, 250110, 250111, 250102
- the extent to which the administrative source are used?: data source
- what kind of administrative data do you access?: micro data
- how do you assess the frequency to which the used administrative data sources are updated?: good
- whether the administrative data are subject to several revisions with (increasing) degree of completeness?: yes
- the relation between the reporting unit for the survey/adminitrative data and the enterpise?: Survey/ administrative data is received from the legal unit

Frame
- What is the variable used for identifying principal and secondary activities?: Personnel (first the industry level value added multipliers are calculated)
- What is the method used for identifying activities?: bottom-up
- Please comment on the frequency of updating the unit's principal activity (stability rules)?: The unit’s principal activity is updated mainly once a year. We have account stability rules so that for certain cases (near 50/50 between principal and secondary) the unit’s principal activity is more stable over time.
- Please comment on the frequency of updating the business register in your NSI: in principle the business register is updated continuously, however most of the units and characteristics are updated once a year
- Please indicate the frequency with which the sample is updated: new sample is drawn every year

Survey for Business Services data:

-Stratification criteria: Activity, Employment size class
-Selection schemes (sampling rates): PPS (probability proportional to size) sampling is used, with turnover as the size measure. The sample covers on average 40 % of the framework population depending on stratum.
-Any possible threshold values: The survey covers enterprises with at least 5 or 20 persons employed, depending on Nace branch. The aim is that the framework covers at least 80% of total turnover in each branch.
-The effective sample size: 1853

The data are inquired from enterprises in the following industries (industry codes in parentheses).

Industries defined in the Regulation:
Information technology services (582, 62, 631)
Legal activities (691)
Accounting, bookkeeping and auditing activities; tax consultancy (692)
Management consultancy activities (702)
Architectural and engineering activities and related technical consultancy (711)
Technical testing and analysis (712)
Advertising (731)
Market research and public opinion polling (732)
Employment activities (78)

Starting from the statistical reference year 2020, data will also be collected due to national data needs concerning the following industries:

Freight transport by road and removal services (494)
Water transport (50)
Air transport (51)
Warehousing and support activities for transportation (52)
Postal and courier activities (53)
Publishing of books, periodicals and other publishing activities (581)
Motion picture, video and television programme production, sound recording and music publishing activities (59)
Programming and broadcasting activities (60)
Other professional, scientific and technical activities (74)

From the statistical reference year 2021 onwards, data are also collected concerning the following industries:

Rental and leasing activities (77)
Travel agency, tour operator and other reservation service and related activities (79)
Security and investigation activities (80)
Services to buildings and landscape activities (81)
Office administrative, office support and other business support activities (82)
Human health activities (86)
Washing and cleaning services (9601)

Depending on the industry, the data are inquired either yearly or every two years.

Annual data collection.

Administrative data:
Direct access to an administrative data base. Part of the administrative data are sent to Statistics Finland.

Scoring model is introduced to detect and evaluate errors.

1. Validation of format and file structure checks.
This validation is made right after extraction the data from administrative data base. The same procedure is applied to the survey data.

2. Intra-dataset checks.
For further information see 18.5.

3. Inter-dataset checks.
Not applicable

4. Intra-domain, intra-source checks.
This includes revision checks and time series checks by industries.

5. Plausibility or consistency checks between two domains available in the same Institution.
Short term incoming data and annual incoming data is compared (eg. turnover) by industries.
6. Plausibility or consistency checks between the data available in the Institution and the data / information available outside the Institution.
For the time being there is no comparable outside database for this type of plausibility or consistency checks.

For Business Services data:

The internal consistency of individual responses is checked while the respondent is filling in the web-questionnaire: the divisions of turnover must sum up to total turnover. Also the completeness of the data is checked: all relevant fields have to be filled in before the respondent can complete the questionnaire.

Plausibility of the responses is checked by comparing the responses with responses from previous years. Significant differences will be cleared up by contacting respondents. In case a large enterprise reports its entire turnover in one CPA class, the enterprise is contacted and the response verified.

It is checked that the enterprise belongs to the correct industry by comparing the CPA category with the biggest turnover share to the enterprise's industry data on the TOL and CPA 3-digit and 4-digit levels. If the biggest CPA category answered by the enterprise does not correspond to the industry, these enterprises are revised in cooperation with the Register of Enterprises and Establishments.

Large enterprises whose turnover is recorded in full in one CPA category are examined. For these enterprises, it should be examined by means of the enterprise's web pages and direct contacts whether the enterprise actually concentrates on producing only one type of service or whether the turnover could be specified in more detail. In recent years, the focus has been on companies with a turnover of over EUR 10 million.

The relative distribution of CPA categories by industry is compared with the distributions of previous years. Possible significant deviations in relative shares are examined in more detail.

Imputation methods:
Tax data is treated automatically using mass editing and imputation techniques. The errors and outliers are edited in following order: Logical edits, Outlier detection, Small errors (<5%) from turnover are re-scaled.
Two types of imputation methods are used in the SBS data. First type is donor imputation which is applied for unit non-response in tax data. The data is imputed using last-years data, VAT-data or nearest neighbour imputation with distance measure. Unit non-response includes those units that have not sent their accounting data to Tax Authority. Second step is item non-response. Item non-response refer to mass imputation of the variables included in direct inquiry and not received from Tax Authority. Primary method used is regression imputation with outlier detection and weighting if necessary.

Survey data is mainly checked manually. It forms the basis for imputation process of some of the variables.

Tax data and survey data is compiled together thus forming our structural business data.

For Business Services data:

The effect of non-response is corrected by calculating the non-response correction coefficient for each stratum based on the numbers of the responding enterprises.

When the data are raised to the whole population, enterprises' turnover data are picked again from the same database of Statistics Finland that is used in the compilation of other business statistics. The enterprise-specific sample weight is multiplied by the stratum-specific non-response correction weight calculated in the first stage, which produces a preliminary weighting coefficient for the enterprise. The turnover data raised with this weighting coefficient are summed by stratum and the sums are compared with the stratum sums selected from the database. Based on these differences, the weighting coefficients are still corrected so that the sums match and correspond with the data of the population, that is, the annual data of Statistics Finland's structural business and financial statement statistics. After this, the enterprises' turnover data are divided to the CPA product categories they have given and are summed by industry, after which the product distribution of the industry can be formed.

The accounting year is not necessarily same as the calendar year. Corrections are made to convert accounting year data to calendar year data if the accounting year is longer than calendar year.

No comments.