Auckland: 29 October - 3 November 2000
Session No. 1
Paper No. 18
Kjell Lorentzen, Statistics Norway, Norway
Progress Report
1. Coverage
Our statistical Business Register (BR) - the Central Register of Enterprises and Establishments (CRE) is closely linked to several administrative registers through the Central Coordinating Register of Legal Entities (ER). From July 1997 until September 2000 this connection has supplied our register with more than 100 000 new legal units, which is an increase from 475 000 to 586 000 units. Among these new units 15 000 self-employed professionals without VAT-tax or employees have entered the register as sole proprietors on our request. The units were identified through information from the Tax Return Register. The quality control of these units is going on at this very moment. With these units included our register now covers all sectors within the Norwegian economy with the possible exception of some units operating within the international shipping business.
In order to help deciding which units are parts of the statistical population, Statistics Norway has this year implemented a BR surveillance system based on information from several administrative sources, the VAT-register, the registers of employers and employees, Tax accounts, the register of company accounts and the Tax Return Register. This system is important in deciding which legal units should have an establishment unit connected to it. In defining the statistical population we also take into account information from the surveys of the structural business statistics.
The register includes legal units and establishments defined as local kind-of-activity units. We are now planning to include the enterprise unit in our register. This will be done by both automatically combining some units - sole proprietors with more than one "legal unit" - and by individual treatment of legal units that are linked together by ownership in a concern or enterprise group or by common use of the same VAT-unit.
2. Administrative and statistical units
Some units are registered in the ER for other administrative purposes than those directly connected to economic activities in Norway like production or trading of goods or services etc. One example is a foreign legal unit that owns a Norwegian registered joint stock company; another is an employed auditor. Both these kinds of units are registered in the ER, but they are so far not regarded as statistical units to be included in CRE. These units are therefore excluded from the CRE or from the statistical population made on the basis of CRE.
Other units that are not legal units, but administrative auxiliary units, are engaged in economic activities. This includes for example VAT-units made up of parts of a legal unit that does not correspond to our definition of an establishment unit. All such VAT-units should be included in the statistical population and this is done by linking them to the relevant legal unit. Thus the turnover from such a unit can be added to that of the legal unit itself.
3. Governmental sector
Since 1997 our register includes a new structure within governmental sector, the state, 18 counties and 435 municipalities. This new structure was established in a project where all legal units, enterprises, organisation units and local kind-of-activity units were implemented in the register. A control system that gives information about the use of the new structure within this sector has also been developed. The system is measuring the use of the local kind-of-activity units and how many employees that are reported at the units within the new structure in the register. The report for October this year showed that approx. 92% of the new structure units of the state and the counties were in use. So were 85% of the units within the municipalities. 100% of all employees within the state and the counties are now reported according to the new structure. The corresponding figure for the municipalities is 94%.
4. Quality assurance
In 1997 there were 16 500 legal units with different number of establishments in the ER and the CRE. Statistics Norway has just finished a project controlling multiunit enterprises by co-ordinating the structure of establishments, i.e. local kind-of-activity units, between the two registers. Next year will be dedicated to a quality check on this structure. The link to the register of employees will be used and also information from the structural statistics. At the same time the quality of the number of employees reported through the register of employees will be controlled. If and when the quality of this register information is regarded as adequate, Statistics Norway will no longer ask our respondents about employment figures.
Next year, a project on enhancing the quality of activity codes by using new information sources will also be launched. This includes exploiting existing annual reporting systems from different administrative registers by printing the activity code and the matching text on the forms. It also includes the systematic use of already registered information about the company goal or purpose and a new system of checking all new units at a certain time after the initial registration.
5. Technology
In 1999 Statistics Norway made a total change in technology from mainframe to UNIX-based client-server technology with our BR converted to a new Oracle database. The change has been a complete success. Our new database has an excellent performance under every working condition and lots of new functionality has been built in. This includes full freedom of selecting any variable or combinations of variables when performing on-line searches for units. Searches that result in more than one unit are displayed in a specially designed list. This list can easily be adapted to individual needs and changed from time to time to include any combination of variables. This list can be moved into excel-files.
Since 1995, with the establishment of the ER, the normal procedure of updating the CRE has been through on-line updating the ER and the next day batch updating the CRE. This year a new "report" database system (RDB) for the registration of changes, like activity codes, addresses, names, institutional sector and cessation, has been made by Statistics Norway. This database is used to update the ER by batch routines and thus our BR is consequently updated. Through the RDB, that is closely connected to the CRE, it is possible to keep full control over all reports received in Statistics Norway about assumed changes and about actual changes that has been registered. This includes information about when the registration was made, who did it and from where did the information come. This system has made it possible to decentralise parts of the work with the register to the divisions responsible for various Structural Business Statistics.
We are also about to build in the RDB an automatic system of noticing by e-mail all interested parties within Statistics Norway when changes in activity codes has been registered concerning all units with more than 50 persons employed. Another part of this system is the semiautomatic production of letters to inform the unit itself, and other parties like the authorities responsible for the registration of employees, about changes in the registration that are considered important. Specially designed letters will be used for example when a legal unit is divided into more than one establishment, when the cessation of an establishment or the transfer of an establishment to another legal unit is registered.
The statistical population is now defined twice a month by extracting all relevant units from the CRE and placing them in "situation files". From 1999 these units are also placed in a "situation database" (SDB). The SDB gives the divisions of Statistics Norway the possibility of making change reports on all or selected units that have changed its activity code between any earlier file and the last file.
6. Co-ordination of surveys
The work earlier reported to develop a better co-ordination of the samples drawn from the business register has not progressed as expected. With a few exceptions like the primary sector and international shipping, the CRE is a common sampling frame for Statistics Norway. The aim to give a more uniform distribution of the response burden among the businesses, has not been met so far. The activity of sending an information letter to most enterprises concerning which surveys the enterprise is a part of, has not been used since 1998.
A new system for the administration of business sample surveys, connected to CRE has been developed. So far, only a few divisions responsible for structural statistics are using this system. A discussion is still going on about how to use this system. Should it be a common system used by all divisions producing business statistics to take care of their samples or only as a database for collecting information about all of the samples and in this way a basis for informing the units of their response burden. It is expected that the activities concerning co-ordination of samples and informing the units of response burdens will be given higher priority in the near future.
7. New variables in the register
With the implementation of the new BR a new system of variable dating were introduced. As a supplement to the registration date, there is now recorded a validity date to all variables as well. The introduction of the RDB made it possible to introduce source codes to all variables in the CRE. These codes distinguish between for example the initial value, any new value registered on-line in the ER, on-line registration in the CRE or changes registered in the RDB, initiated from any particular Structural Business Statistics survey or from any other specified source.
As a result of a project made in connection with our population census in the year 2001, most of our local kind-of-activity units has been given a geographical co-ordinate based on the local address matched to the Ground Property, Address and Building Register (GAB). This information will be used for example to delineate areas with high density of economic activity. Since we know from the registers of employers and employees where "everyone" works and from the central register of persons where "everyone" lives, it is also possible to calculate commuting patterns. The units where this matching was a success are commonly situated in the densely populated areas where the quality of both addresses and GAB are good and where this kind of information is of great importance within fields like area and transportation planning. The rest of the units will be given a local area code. This geographical information will be included in our register in the near future.
8. A central database for statistical standards
The Division for standards and development is in the process of building up a central database containing all statistical standards used within Statistics Norway. The specifications have been worked out and parts of the database will be operative from 1 January 2001.
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