Explanatory Memorandum to COM(2005)112 - Common framework for business registers for statistical purposes - Main contents
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| dossier | COM(2005)112 - Common framework for business registers for statistical purposes. |
|---|---|
| source | COM(2005)112  |
| date | 05-04-2005 |
The existing Business Registers Regulation (BR) (2186/93), which harmonised the business registers used by the Member States for statistical purposes, dates back to 1993 and is now partly outdated. In recent years, the situation has changed significantly and statistical requirements have evolved.
Three kinds of additional requirements have progressively emerged:
- globalisation of the economy has created the need to collect information on enterprise groups;
- the integration of activities of the different sectors has called for a full coverage of the whole economy;
- the Single Market requires improved statistical comparability, which notably depends on the availability of harmonised sources for the population of businesses operating in the EU.
The objective of the proposal is to update the existing BR Regulation to take these new requirements into account.
To achieve that aim, several modifications to the current BR Regulation are proposed and summarised in the paragraphs below.
2. CONTENTS OF THE REGULATION
Given the new data requirements presented above, two major changes are introduced in the proposed draft Regulation.
- All the enterprises carrying out economic activities contributing to gross domestic product, their local units and the corresponding legal units should be registered on a mandatory basis (some sectors of activity are optional in the current version of the Regulation).
- Financial links and enterprise groups will have to be covered and data on multinational groups and their constituent units will have to be exchanged between countries and Eurostat.
2.1. Full coverage of the economy
The existence of Community statistical legislation covering the whole economy, and the increasing use of business registers for national accounts purposes, make it essential for the business registers to cover the whole economy. The additional sectors to be covered on a mandatory basis are “public administration” and “agriculture and fishing”.
Inclusion of Public Administration
The role of the public sector is changing. Certain activities previously managed by the public sector can now be managed by public or private enterprises. To get a clear picture of the situation, more comparable sources on those activities are needed. This can only be achieved by the compulsory coverage of the public sector in the national business registers used for statistical purposes, according to agreed standards.
Inclusion of Agriculture and Fishing
The strong policy interest in rural development requires information not only on agriculture but also on its increasing combination with other activities which are not covered by the largely product-based agricultural statistics. A harmonised treatment of agriculture in business registers will give the basic information needed for rural policy.
2.2. Data on enterprise groups
There is a growing demand for enterprise group information, at the national level for the purpose of assessing the concentration of the economy, and at the international level for the production of statistics related to globalisation. To meet that demand, many statistics are already produced, some of them under Community statistical law (statistics on foreign affiliates, balance of payments, and external trade), but more are needed. The current situation, where only the truncated parts of the enterprise groups in the national territory are registered, is not sufficient and the data on the multinational groups must be consolidated at the European level.
The draft regulation requires the National business registers to record the financial links between legal units and to transmit information on cross-national linkages to the Commission (Eurostat).
This should result in
- harmonised sampling frames for the existing surveys which use the concept of financial links;
- better comparability of many current statistics, where financial links between enterprises in different countries play an important role, e.g. productivity data;
- additional information on the population of enterprise groups as the registers could also be used as direct sources of statistics on globalisation. This would be invaluable for different Community competition and research policies and for trade negotiations.
This proposal should also bring the scope and the quality of multinational enterprise group data much closer to the USA level.
3. IMPACT OF THE PROPOSAL
Most Member States have already partly implemented the new requirements
In almost all Member States, the three optional NACE sections are already at least partially covered and certain information on enterprise groups is available or under preparation. In the majority of cases a framework thus already exists and it is up to the Member States to take further measures to improve their coverage or quality, for instance by possible use of additional sources. Starting from the different national situations, a harmonisation between all Member States can only be obtained through the adoption of the common methodology, as presented in the proposed Regulation.
Recording of small entities is not required
Because international interest focuses on multinational groups, there are no strict requirements on the coverage of all-resident groups. The coverage of the smallest enterprises without employed persons is also left to subsidiarity, because this depends on the administrative sources nationally available. Thus the national situation and varying availability of sources have been taken into account where possible.
Some variables are optional in order to keep implementation costs at a reasonable level
The recording of certain variables is conditional on the availability of the information from administrative sources in individual the Member States and certain enterprise group variables are optional until the transmission of the data to Eurostat - consolidation of the data in Eurostat, and feedback of the consistent corrected data back to Member States - has been established. An important example of this is the definition of the controlling country in Foreign Affiliates statistics, where the nationally available information may be inconsistent or missing and consistency can only be ensured at European level.
Turnover is optional for agriculture, fishing and the public sector.
4. CONSULTATION WITH THE MEMBER STATES
The draft Regulation is the product of extensive consultations with the Member States and has been discussed at length by the various interested parties, several times in the Business Registers–Statistical Units Working Group and in the meetings of Directors of Business Statistics and of the Statistical Programme Committee. The views of major users in the Member States, EFTA, Candidate Countries and in the Commission and of other stakeholders have been considered. The present proposal is a balanced position between the level of detail needed by the main users and the workload in the National Statistical Institutes.