Statistical business registers: a ‘cornerstone’ of official statistics

In our newsletters, we feature information on the latest activities and developments of the Web Intelligence Network (WIN) from the Network’s blog. This quarter, we share highlights from its post on statistical business registers.

Statistical business registers provide valuable information on enterprises, which is needed to produce official figures on business and macroeconomic statistics.  

Traditionally, business registers are derived and maintained from administrative data, such as Chamber of Commerce registers and surveys. However, nowadays most enterprises have one or more websites of their own, which contain valuable information that can supplement or improve business registers. Other sources such as domain registry data, news or social media items may also help to improve registers.  

This is the idea behind the WIN’s work in this area, which focuses primarily on: 

- identifying websites belonging to a unit from the Statistical Business Register – the process referred to as ‘URL finding’ – and 

- subsequently, scraping the relevant information from the website of the enterprise, and  

- interpreting and deriving variables from the scraped website content with a view to determining or improving NACE codes for the enterprise’s economic activities. 

So far, the results from the ongoing work on correcting, completing and improving Statistical Business Registers based on the web data and other online sources are promising. This work will continue in the coming years, applying a combination of various methods to further improve the registers. 

If you are interested in this topic, read the WIN full blog post, which provides more details on the project’s findings.