Dissemination and statistical use of Business Register data

1
Dissemination and statistical use of Business
Register data

• Conference of European statisticians
• Group of experts of Business Registers
• Luxembourg, 6-7 O2ctober 2009

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Business Register in Finland - duties

• Compile statistics concerning business population
  and business demography
• Base register for production of statistics
• Provide chargeable information services to
  outside users
• Future plans

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Business Register in Finland - 40 years (1)

• Main phases of development
• 1954, 1964 business censuses
• output statistics on business population
• 1970s, regular register maintenance, main ideas
  
• statistics of business population
• contributing NA statistics

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Business Register in Finland - 40 years (2)

• 1980 - 1995 intensive development phase
• increasing coverage
• development of register based statistics
  production
• development of base registers and business
  identification codes
• increasing use of administrative files
• growth of chargeable information services
• background early phases of information society,
  rationality in sharing data on basic units with
  all users in society

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Income from Business Register services
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Business Register in Finland - 40 years (3)

• from 1995 on, topics like
• EU regulations
• quality questions, small area statistics
• dynamics, complex business structures,
  globalisation
• enterprise group unit
• response burden
• Annex 1 in my paper milestones in the
  development of Business Register

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Business register, number of business
enterprises- increasing coverage
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main BR duties 1 Compiling statistics
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Compiling and dissemination of statistics -
business population

• from Business Register production database -gt we
  produce annual data files for source of annual
  statistics a kind of frozen version of BR for
  each reference year
• file of enterprises
• file of local units
• threshold 0,5 employment and 6 months activity
  period (comparable statistics over time)
• it means more workload to produce the annual data
  file

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Compiling and dissemination of statistics -
business population

• statistics by NACE, by region, by legal form, by
  size category of employment and turnover,
  variables employment, turnover, sum of wages and
  salaries in StatFin database enterprises, local
  units
• analysis
• published in Statistics Finland home pages(EN)
  (FI)
• paper publication Enterprises in Finland

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Compiling and dissemination of statistics -
business demography

• from Business Register production database it is
  compiled quarterly statistics on Enterprise
  openings and closures
• statistics by NACE, by region, by legal form,
  variable number of enterprises in StatFin
  -database
• analysis
• published in Statistics Finland home pages(EN)
  (FI)
• business demography statistics according to EU
  harmonised method are not yet published in Finland

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main BR duties 2 Business Register use in
statistics production process

• the most important role of Business Register

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Business Register use in statistics production

• BR database collects and merges plenty of
  administrative data as common frame for
  statistics (annex 2 of the paper)
• BR is important tool when linking administrative
  and survey data
• BR is survey frame for all direct data
  collections
• BR is data source in register based statistics
  production
• it provides basic units, classifications,
  employment, turnover
• as an example recently SBS in Finland gave up
  collecting and estimating employment data for
  itself and started to use exclusively BR
  employment variable
• Tool of profiling activities
• Tool for enterprise respondent service
• Tool in statistics on globalisation - enterprise
  groups

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Sharing Business Register data - in-house

• BR database is in wide use inside Statistics
  Finland
• about 300 users from economic as well as from
  social statistics
• on-line access or reading by batch programs
• use is supported by BR metadata kept available in
  Statistics Finland (quality reports, time table
  of BR updating, variable descriptions, process
  descriptions)

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In-house co-operation, examples

• common data collection with FATS-statistics on
  foreign owned enterprises (MNEs in Finland)
• common data collection with regional employment
  statistics on multi-site enterprises (their local
  units and employment-local unit links)
• profiling large and complex enterprises - the
  network coordinator is working in BR profiling
  activities started in 2008

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Enterprise respondent register

• contains information from all Statistics Finland
  business data collections
• respondent service about Statistics Finland data
  collection
• enables measuring response burden

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main BR duties 3 Sharing Business Register data
with outside users
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Data dissemination as chargeable services

• tailor made statistics
• unit level data
• in standard form
• ad-hoc information services
• defining business populations according to
  customer wishes
• updating customer registers periodically, etc.
• mass data deliveries for further dissemination
• web based enterprise lists, business portals
• BR service database monthly deliveries available
  of whole populations and all public variables

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Boundary condition for unit level data
dissemination

• The Statistics Act includes specific provisions
  on the public data items of the Business
  Register, the list include
• BI-code, name, postal address and code, telephone
  number
• Legal form, ownership, activity code, domicile,
  language
• Personnel, size class of personnel (local unit),
  size class of turnover
• Code of import or export
• Relationships of enterprise groups

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Problems of unit level data dissemination

• Confidentiality in large and small enterprises
• with large enterprises threat of revealing
  sensitive information connected to competition
  with other enterprises
• with small enterprises (like farms etc) threat
  of revealing sensitive information connected to
  proximity of private and business life family
  and enterprise mixed
• Not all enterprises are happy about data sharing,
  but only small minority is actually opposing

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How to manage the contradictions

• open administration, in general public base
  registers are widely accepted in Finland
• thanks to well known base register co-operation
  among Finnish administration (a special board)
• Statistic Act strictly regulates the list of
  public data
• the principles of unit level data dissemination
  are clearly told to respondents in survey letters
  and in Statistics Finland Internet pages

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Benefits of unit level data dissemination

• feedback from data users and enterprises
  themselves
• increased knowledge about BR and BR data quality
• route to disseminate NACE Rev 2
• saving taxpayers money, co-operation helps whole
  administration
• release of local unit level data (BR is the only
  source that covers all sectors) useful for
  regional organisations
• saving response burden

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Customers of outside services

• large private companies, banking and insurance
  sector
• research institutes, schools
• single researches
• public sector (government, ministries, regional
  planning and local organisations)
• private sector 70 , public sector 30
• Customer relations in outside services
• BR service team, 4 persons
• Business Register Service Guide

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Statistics Finlands Research Laboratory

• mainly for economic research purposes
• access to encrypted micro level data
• contain several data sets including Business
  Register data (enterprise, local units,
  enterprise groups)
• Remote on-line access under development

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Future plans
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The System of Economic Statistics
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Current strategic goals for Business Register

• globalisation - to cover MNEs and to operate in
  the EGR network
• means in improving coherence of economic
  statistics
• efficiency of production - the BR as a common
  frame of business statistics
• a more real time Business Register with
  interactive nature
• present data architecture originates from 1997

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Business Register redesign project

• Definition stage ongoing 2009
• Goals
• to establish a data warehouse solution for
  business statistics
• to define interactive BR processes inside
  Statistics Finland
• to define well operating system for
  administrative data capture including metadata
  management
• to define changes in Business Register data
  content

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Thank you for your attention!Tuula
ViitaharjuHead, Business RegisterStatistics
Finlandtuula.viitaharju_at_stat.fitel 358 9 1734
3378