European business profiling — Recommendations manual — 2020 edition - Products Manuals and Guidelines

In official statistics, the enterprise has long been associated with its purely legal definition, the legal unit. With economic globalisation, large multinational enterprise groups (MNE groups) are more and more complex in terms of their legal organisation. This has led to a growing gap between the view of the productive system based on legal units and the economic reality.
To address this challenge, the National Statistical Institutes (NSIs) decided to go beyond the legal unit and to implement a new statistical unit, the enterprise. The implementation of the enterprise is done by business profiling.
In the last decade, Eurostat has encouraged European NSIs to cooperate in order to achieve a relevant and consistent cross-border view of MNE groups. This method is called “European Business Profiling”. It is carried out collaboratively by the profiling teams of the NSIs of the different countries where an enterprise group is located.
This manual provides recommendations on profiling MNE groups in the scope of European Business Profiling, and more generally guidance for business profiling.