Arto Luhtio

Eurostat, European Union

1. Status and update on progress of business registers (BR)

The great event in spring 2004 was the enlargement of the European Union from 15 to 25 Member States with over 450 million inhabitants. Eurostat had prepared for this and the Annual BR Inquiry already covered the new Member States, the Candidate Countries (there are currently 4) and the EFTA countries. The results of the inquiries were presented in the Eurostat Business Register Working Group in June 2004.

Roundtable web site

An International Roundtable on Business Survey Frames web site, where all the documents from all the meetings as from 1986 are available on line was created in 2003 in the EU CIRCA environment at address:

http://forum.europa.eu.int/irc/dsis/businessurvey/info/data/links.htm

The web site is open to everybody (no userID or password needed). It includes all the documents of the past Roundtables, as well as addresses to other web sites which include information on business registers, also at country level (if your business register web site is missing, please inform us so we can add it!).                                                                                                                                      

BRnet web site

The Eurostat business register web site BRnet can be accessed at the general CIRCA address:

http://forum.europa.eu.int/Public/irc/dsis/Home/main

The access to BRnet is restricted (by userID and password) to persons working with business registers. The participants of the Roundtable can sign up on the general CIRCA site and ask for an access to BRnet (from the author). BRnet is an extensive source including e.g. EU meeting documents, methodological manuals and detailed reports on the improvement of BR quality in Member States.

2. Issues and problems resolved during the past year

Revision of the Business Register Regulation

A draft for a new Regulation replacing the existing one will be presented to Business Statistics Directors 25-26 October and to the Statistical Programme Committee 17-18 November 2004. The main changes are to make coverage of enterprise groups and whole economy compulsory and to transmit individual data on multinational groups to Eurostat.

Business demography

An account of Eurostat work is given in session 8.

Statistical units

An EU Task Force on statistical units was established in 2000 and will give its final report to the Business Statistics Directors meeting in October. An agreement on the operational definition of enterprises has been reached for simple cases; for large and complex businesses more work and case studies are needed.

BR Recommendations Manual

The Manual is now available in 11 EU languages in CIRCA on Business Methods and BRnet web sites. If the revision of the BR Regulation is accepted, several chapters of the Manual need to be revised.

Globalisation

A new Regulation on Foreign Affiliates Statistics (FATS) is in the process to be accepted. FATS statistics is heavily dependent on business registers as a source of foreign control of enterprises.

Following the new draft BR Regulation a project on how to best record multinational group links is ongoing.

3. Future plans

Future plans depend on the acceptance of the new BR Regulation. If it is accepted, the great challenge is to plan on the creation of a European register on multinational groups.