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The Development of the Annual Business Inquiry
Describing the development of the ABI - a new integrated survey of employment and accounting information from businesses and other establishments in most industry sectors of the economy.
This paper describes the ABI project undertaken by the ONS over the past few years to integrate its main annual surveys of businesses across all economic sectors and also to bring together surveys of employment and financial data. The financial data collected includes turnover(sales), purchases, employment costs, inventories, investment, taxes and subsidies. Applications of ABI data include production of annual employment estimates, calculation of gross value added for the measurement of GDP, productivity estimates, input-output tables and other national accounts applications. The ABI is also capable of generating a wide range of sub-national analyses, another objective of the development. Additionally, the ABI allows the UK to meet its obligations under the EC Structural Business Statistics Regulation. Methodological aspects covered by the paper include sample design, estimation and outlier treatment at the national level, apportionment of data from reporting units to local units(individual sites) and the methodology for sub-national and small area estimation. The sub-national methodology involves the use of logistic and loglinear modelling of the survey data.
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