Giuseppe Garofalo
ISTAT, Italy

1. Local Units Survey

The administrative sources currently used to update the BR (Tax Register, Chambers of Commerce, Social Security Register, Yellow Pages) are affected both by low quality of information on local units and by lack ness of information on employment variables at local units level. Therefore the statistical BR cannot be used for territorial analysis of the productive structure. In order to get all the necessary information the Italian National Statistical Institute has launched a new survey on local units. It will be an annual census on all enterprises with one hundred or more employees and an annual sample survey on the rest, concerning economic activity, identification variables and other structural information. Local units of medium-small enterprises will be updated through a probabilistic methodology that will use both data from administrative sources and surveys¡¯ results. The new statistical business register on local units is expected for April/May 2005 (ASIA-Local Units).   

2. Enterprise Groups

In 2004 ISTAT updated the BR on EG to year 2002 and continued profiling the 19 most important domestic controlled EG (accounting for more than one thousand legal units and one quarter of total employment of all EG in Italy), and 5 foreign controlled ones. ISTAT participates to the MNE Project, and our progresses will be given in the MNE Progress Report by Statistics Canada. The analysis of complex structures of EG, as far as ancillary activities, horizontal and vertical integration are concerned, is in progress. The main objective is to evaluate the impact of statistical units¡¯ definitions on value added and employment for National Accounts. The BR on EG is used to extract samples for the Inward Statistics on Foreign Affiliates survey. Results obtained for years 2000, 2001 and 2002, collected in one unique survey during 2004, have been used to update the BR with the information on the nationality of the Ultimate Control. The BR on EG is now available On-Line and fully integrated with the general BR on enterprises and legal units.

3. Data Dissemination

The significant increase in the demand for individual and aggregate information by external users (Central and Local Government, Universities, Economists and Researchers) strongly requires the realisation of a Data Warehouse of the BR. The realisation is under study and it calls for several issues to be considered: on one side the need to make such data accessible to public, on the other the constraint posed by the national legislation on confidentiality. Different kinds of access to the Data Warehouse will be foreseen, according to the users (e.g. some administrative bodies will have the possibility to get individual information, some other only aggregate information without any restriction, private users only aggregate information under some restrictions). At the same time a new system of publishing and dissemination strategy has been planned, concerning analysis conducted by using the whole set of information of the BR. For the time being three publications are going to be printed on the Structure and Characteristics of Enterprises in Italy, on Enterprise Demography and on Enterprise Groups. When data on Local Units will be available form the survey¡¯s results, territorial and sectoral analyses will be carried on, too.    

4. Data Quality

In order to experiment a prototype of software for co-ordinated samples selection from the BR frame, Istat is developing and testing different methodologies. To this aim an internal survey, carried out in 2004, asked survey¡¯s managers to indicate the main problematic areas, concerning the BR, having impact on their survey organisation timetable. From the BR prospective this information are used to help priorities register development especially with regards to timeliness and punctuality. The BR department is working on these quality aspects, for the 2005 BR release it is foreseen an anticipated dissemination of about 3 months.

5. Integration of new sectors of activity in the BR

With the new European Regulation the scope of the Business Register is extended to units carrying out activity in Section A, B and L of the NACE rev 1.1 (collection of data for these areas was optional in previous regulation). The extension to the public administration sector ¨C at least for the units of the S13 sector of the System of European Counts 1995 ¨C is foreseen within the end of 2004, while the more complex agriculture sector will be integrated within 2005.  In particular the agricultural register will be built through the integration of various administrative data. The main sources will be:

•      Register of Agricultural Payments: collects  information on agricultural subsidies that European Union pays to producers

•      Chambers of Commerce Register - Special Sections: collects ¡°legal¡± information on entrepreneurs caring on their main activity in agricultural sector

•      Register on Agricultural Social Contributions: collects information on social contribution of the agricultural workers, self-entrepreneurs and farmers

•      Register of Bovine Animals: collects information to be used for the identification and the traceability of the bovines (for swine and sheep the register is under development) and information on places (named agricultural holdings) where the animals are handled.

The feasibility study carried out during 2003 showed that integration of the previous administrative sources guarantees coverage of at least 85% of the whole Arable Land Area collected with the 2000 Agricultural Census.

Enclosing new sectors in the BR needs the re-engineering of the Data Base in order to integrate the old conceptual structure with the new unit typologies ¨C Agricultural Holding and Public Institution ¨C e to redefine the relationships between the units (e.g. enterprise/agricultural holding).

6. Classifications and Definitions

The main effort concerns the new economic activity classification 2007 (ISIC Rev. 4). In addition ISTAT has developed for the first time a complete classification of Legal Forms in Italy, and is going to realise an internal Manual on the Definition and Classification of Statistical Units, that will serve to identify common operational criteria for the treatment of statistical units, within the Statistical Institute, on the basis of European Regulation definitions.