Archive:EuroGroups register

This Statistics Explained article is outdated and has been archived - for recent articles on structural business statistics see here.

With the EuroGroups Register (EGR) project, Eurostat is currently creating a network of business registers used for statistical purposes in European Union (EU) and and European Free Trade Association (EFTA) countries, focused on multinational enterprise groups.

A multinational enterprise group is defined as an enterprise group comprising at least 2 enterprises or legal units located in different countries.

To create the EuroGroups Register, Eurostat collects input information on group members and on their relationships from the national statistical business registers of EU countries and participating EFTA countries, and from commercial sources.

After consolidation and validation, the register contains the global structure of the multinational enterprise groups. National register staff and statistics compilers are given access to all units of the multinational enterprise groups, if at least one of the group’s units is within their national territory. These populations can be used for national survey frames.

The necessary data exchange between the national business registers and Eurostat is defined in Article 11 of Regulation 177/2008 on business registers and implemented through 2 regulations on exchange of confidential data.

To make it easier to identify the relevant statistical entities (i.e. the enterprises) of large and complex multinational enterprise groups, a project has been set up to develop a standardised method for ‘profiling’.

This article is part of the online European business statistics manual, a comprehensive guide to methodologies and how business statistics are produced within the European Statistical System (ESS).

Full article

EuroGroups Register production cycles

The EGR produces annual data. Its frames for reference year T are available for users 15 months after the end of the reference year, in March T+2. The Register’s first reference year was 2008, since when a frame has been produced for all reference years.

For 2008, the EGR system produced data on 6350 multinational enterprise groups. For reference year 2009, the second EGR cycle processed data on over 8 000 groups. The 2010 and 2011 EGR cycles produced data on over 10 000 multinational enterprise groups. These 4 EGR cycles were implemented using version 1.0 of the EGR system. The EGR 1.0 process was based on commercial data, which were validated through comparison with national data.

Work towards developing the EGR 2.0 system started in 2012, and the new process was fully launched in 2015. The switch to EGR 2.0 improved both the EGR process and the IT system. Currently, EGR collects data from national statistical institutes and complements them with commercial data. As a result of the changeover from EGR 1.0 to EGR 2.0, NSI data - which are only supplemented by commercial data - became more relevant.

EGR 2.0 aims to cover all relevant multinational enterprise groups active in Europe. For 2013, EGR produced data of 47 000, for 2014 of 61 000, for 2015 of 80 000 multinational enterprise groups. For the last reference year, 2016, EGR produced data on 111 000 groups and covering 779 000 enterprises.

Data

The EGR registers the following units of a multinational enterprise group and their characteristics:

legal units: identity, demographic, control and ownership characteristics;
enterprises: identity and demographic characteristics, activity code (NACE), number of persons employed, turnover, institutional sector;
enterprise groups: identity, group structure, the group head, the country of global decision centre, activity code (NACE), consolidated employment and group turnover.

It is planned that the EGR should become the platform that supports the production of micro-based statistics on globalisation in Europe. EGR data help national statistical institutes and national central banks compile statistics and are not disseminated by Eurostat to the public.

The EGR is designed to provide a unique survey frame for these and other statistics and thereby to serve as the basic tool for improving these statistics, while also reducing the reporting burden.

The EGR is the source of the related Statistics Explained article Structure of multinational enterprise groups in the EU, presenting the population of active multinational groups in the EU in 2016.

Information system

EGR version 2.0 offers online applications for users with remote access. With the EGR applications users can identify legal units, browse and improve EGR data. Users and producers alike benefit from the following EGR applications:

EuroGroups register identification service - an application supporting the EGR producers in identifying legal units.
EuroGroups Register CORE application - the heart of EGR system, it stores, transforms and consolidates input data of different sources and generates the EGR frames.
EuroGroups Register interactive module - an interactive web interface to browse and validate data in the consolidation area of EGR.
EuroGroups register FATS online interface - an application providing users with a foreign affiliates statistics (FATS) oriented web interface for browsing and downloading EGR data.

Eurostat has set up a wiki platform with extensive information on various topics covered by the EGR project. Access is restricted to EGR data producers and users working in national statistical authorities. The EGR wiki provides:

full, detailed EGR documentation
a calendar of EGR activities
quality indicators
a forum for discussing and share experiences among members.

Context

The fragmented picture that EU countries currently have of multinational enterprise groups operating on the EU market causes growing problems of harmonisation for several types of statistics affected by globalisation (including foreign affiliates statistics (FATS), foreign direct investment and external trade).

The EGR was developed as part of the programme for modernisation of European enterprise and trade statistics (MEETS).

Eurostat and the EU countries are running a project to develop the national statistical business registers and the EGR. It is called ESBRs, the European System of Interoperable Statistical Business Registers. The ESBRs project aims to pass from the present situation, characterised by disconnected registers in Member States, to an efficient European system of interoperable statistical business registers, including an improved EGR.

In 2016 Eurostat and the EU countries launched a programme designed to improve the quality of national statistical business registers and the EGR. The programme monitors existing data quality of registers (‘as is’ state) and defines quality criteria (‘to be’ state). Assessing data quality will provide information that can be used to further improve quality. EGR recommendations are regularly drawn up with a view to constantly improving data quality.