Steve Vale (Office for National Statistics, UK), Claire Powell

Developments in Business Demography - Reconciling Conflicting Demands

This paper will compare the methods and issues for enterprise demography both in the UK and the EU. Two key publications, "PA1003 - Size Analysis of United Kingdom Businesses" and the "Small and Medium Enterprise Statistics in the UK" bullettin have been produced for many years. The methodology used and any issues effecting the data will be examined. The development of Neighbourhood Statistics will drive this work forward in the future, details of existing work to meet the demand for regional statistics will be provided.

For the last few years the UK has been part of a taskforce to develop a harmonised methodology and is currently finalised the second harmonised data collection. Details on the background to the EU project, the type of data, and the indicators will be presented. The EU methodology will be compared to that used in the UK. Again looking to future requests the work may be expanded to cover local unit and enterprise group demography, while at enterprise level, information on factors of success will become increasingly importance such as entrepreneurship. Finally the paper will look at other work done by OECD/UNECE on globalisation.

Session: 2a   Auditorium   Category: Innovative uses of business register data

Paper