26th Meeting of the Wiesbaden Group on Business Registers

Call for Papers (updated) (PDF: 193 KB)
Template for Abstract (DOC:31KB)

Meeting of the Wiesbaden Group on Business Registers

The Wiesbaden Group invites authors and attendees to submit original papers for the various conference sessions for the 26th Meeting of the Wiesbaden Group, which will take place on 24 – 27 September 2018, in Neuchâtel, Switzerland. All attendees are encouraged to participate, as this is a forum for the exchange of views and experiences and the conduct of joint experiments related to the development, maintenance, and use of business registers to support a more integrated approach to structural economic statistics. Abstracts should be between 300 – 500 words in length and the Template should be used.

Please submit the abstracts to the following email: wiesbaden2018@bfs.admin.ch and to the respective session leader.

Deadline for the abstracts: 15 Mai 2018 8 June 2018 (prolonged)

Deadline for the session papers: 15 July 2018

Deadline for the Power Point presentations: 20 August 2018

Session 1

Country Progress Report

Session leader: TBD, Swiss Federal Statistical Office FSO

Participants were already asked by email to provide their Country Progress Report (deadline: 16 April 2018).

Session 2

Innovation in Statistical Business Registers

Session leader: Arturo BLANCAS ESPEJO, Director General of Economic Statistics, National Institute of Statistics and Geography, Mexico

Society’s growing demands for information on economic statistics, its need for knowledge on related 2 emergent topics, and resource limitations inside National Statistical Institutes (NSIs), lead us to the need to improve the processes associated with the generation of economic statistics. For instance, technological advances and the economic globalization have forced businesses to modify both their operating model and their organizational architecture; sometimes this makes the process of collecting business data for statistical purposes (vital to the operations of NSIs) more difficult, therefore new strategies should be adopted.

Since the Statistical Business Register (SBR) is the backbone for the production of economic statistics, innovation in this subject acquires essential importance.

The task of innovating is complex; however, current technological development, the existence of great volumes of information (big data and other data sources) easily accessible at a global level, experiences from workgroups, and current methodological developments on SBR related topics, are factors that can motivate the development of new ideas.

The objective of this session is to know and to share recent experiences, as well as new conceptual, technological and methodological developments related to the construction, maintenance and exploitation of SBRs. Works presented in this session will help to stimulate and develop further innovative ideas about SBR management.

Contributions are invited and encouraged on a range of topics and issues related to innovations in SBR, including (but not limited to):

• SBR reengineering and its integration to the statistical production process.
• New business architecture solutions.
• New functionalities of SBRs.
• New technological advances on data (or big data) sharing among different sources, aiming at establishing and/or maintaining an SBR
• Innovations on methodologies for data harmonization across data sources linked by an SBR.
• New SBR-directly-derived statistics and products.

Please submit an abstract of your paper to the conference organizer at the email wiesbaden2018@bfs.admin.ch and to the session leader (arturo.blancas@inegi.org.mx with copy to hugo.hernandez@inegi.org.mx ) by 15 May 2018.

Session 3

Integrated Statistical Register Systems

Session leader: Andrew ALLEN, Head of Statistical Business Register Development, Office for National Statistics, United Kingdom

The purpose of this session is to explore how statistical business registers can be part of a wider system which maximises their use as a data asset for NSI’s. Technology allows a relatively new opportunity for the SBR to play a greater role in statistical production and analysis. By linking multiple sources of data to the SBR, important policy questions can be addressed. Examples include linking business and people to enable greater understanding of the characteristics of business owners, and how this can help formulate policy towards entrepreneurship.

The business register spine function, where the Business register can facilitate linking of administrative sources, can lead to the register being used directly (rather than just as a sample frame) to produce core economic outputs. Examples would include using the register to facilitate the use of employment tax records in labour market outputs.

The key to this type of work is suitable identifiers across sources and the use of common data repositories, such as data lakes/warehouses. Any recent examples of this type of integration will be of interest to this session. As well as reporting on the technology environment, papers focusing on the practicalities of creating such systems and showing the resulting benefits by giving examples of new outputs would be particularly welcome.

This session also covers the data sharing and legal aspects of this type of work, so again examples of how these issues have been managed would be welcome. There are often higher levels of security associated with data relating to people, whereas data relating to businesses can range from publicly available to secure. This can make linking records technically more difficult when some data has been anonymised, so approaches to this issue would be welcome.

Please submit an abstract of your paper to the conference organizer at the email wiesbaden2018@bfs.admin.ch and to the session leader (Andrew.allen@ons.gov.uk) by 15 May 2018.

Session 4

Administrative Data

Session leader: Irene SALEMINK, Director Production Services, Division of Data Collection, Statistics Netherlands

Modern Statistical Business Registers are often based on legal units derived from administrative sources like the trade register or the tax administration. However, national governmental bodies also maintain many other kinds of administrative sources that can be very useful to produce economic statistics and to improve timelines, coverage and the quality of the SBR. By acquiring access to administrative sources, understanding and exploiting their content, a strengthened backbone role of the SBR can be achieved. Information from administrative sources can be directly incorporated or linked to the (live register of) the SBR making administrative data coordinated accessible to statisticians. Development of satellite registers is possible by deriving new characteristics for subpopulations from administrative data sources, for example delineating family owned businesses or the self-employed.

Objectives of this session are to collect best practices dealing with topics like getting access to administrative data for statistical purposes, communication and cooperation with administrative data suppliers, methods to maintain and exploit administrative sources, securing the quality of administrative data for statistical purposes and extending the backbone role of the SBR.

Contributors are invited and encouraged to submit abstracts on:

• Methods to derive new characteristics by combining the information of administrative sources, preparation of administrative data for the SBR
• Quality and pitfalls of using administrative data in statistical processes
• Integrated statistical production systems
• Challenges and agreements to get access to administrative sources
• Communication and cooperation with the suppliers of administrative sources about the exchange of microdata
• The impact of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation)
• Inventories of useful (national) administrative sources (trade data, BEPS)
• Metadata management to store, maintain and retrieving administrative data
• Extension of the role of the SBR by the use of new administrative sources

Please submit an abstract of your paper to the conference organizer at the email wiesbaden2018@bfs.admin.ch and to the session leader (i.salemink@cbs.nl) by 15 May 2018.

Session 5

New Data Sources

Session leader: Ronald JANSEN, Assistant Director of the United Nations Statistics Division, and Chief of the Data Innovation and Capacity Development Branch

It is an obligation to the society for each national statistical system to use all available data sources to produce high quality and relevant statistical outputs in a cost effective manner. Those data sources will consist of a mix of administrative sources, census data, survey data and new data sources, such as satellite images, smart meters, mobile phone and social media data, and web-scraping data.

This session focuses on the experiences of your office in the use of new data sources (in combination with existing data sources) and corresponding new technologies to improve timelines, coverage and the quality of the SBR and to possibly derive new statistical products.

In describing these experiences, you can cover any or all of the following steps: (1) acquisition of new data sources, including service agreements, transparency of the data source, frequency of updating and the available detail of the data; (2) technology requirements for data storage, pre-processing and processing; in-house or partnership arrangements in storing and processing; need for new skills and new jobs; (3) linking and matching with existing data sources in the updating of the SBR; possible use of machine learning tools; (4) possible creation of new statistical outputs; and (5) cost-benefit analysis of use of new data sources in relation to existing data sources.

The objective of this session is to share experiences dealing with innovation and the use of new data sources for improving and extending the role of the SBR.

Please submit an abstract of your paper to the conference organizer at the email wiesbaden2018@bfs.admin.ch and to the session leader (jansen1@un.org) by 15 May 2018.

Session 6

Profiling and Globalisation

Session leader: Merja RANTALA, Head of Unit – Coordination and infrastructure development, Eurostat, the Statistical Office of the European Union

Statistical business registers are key contributors to high quality statistical output. Defining statistical units which are relevant for data collection as well as for statistical output especially for large and complex units is important. Complex enterprises and multinational enterprise groups create challenges for a reflection of their activities in national statistics across different statistical domains as well as on a regional/global level in a way which is comprehensive and consistent, while avoiding doublecounting.

The purpose of this session is to explore in particular how the challenges created by globalisation could be addressed with the help of business registers; how profiling activities and business registers can contribute to ensure an improved quality and consistency of statistical output in economic statistics, taking into consideration cooperation across statistical domains and between countries. Furthermore the role of national business registers and supranational registers in better measuring of globalization phenomena could be illustrated.

Examples of profiling activities (either automatic profiling or manual profiling done in cooperation with 5

the MNE) which have led to improved quality of economic statistics on a national and international level would be welcome.

Experiences in the coordination role of the business registers and cooperation between different statistical domains, such as the business registers, national accounts, foreign affiliate, foreign direct in-vestment and foreign trade (goods or services) statistics could also be illustrated to demonstrate the benefits (or challenges) in terms of improving quality of statistical output. Examples of the work carried out by the Large Cases Units and their links to the business registers could also be provided in this context.

Several initiatives on unique global identifiers are ongoing. National experiences showing how the out-come of such initiatives can be integrated in the business registers could define best practices for other countries.

Please submit an abstract of your paper to the conference organizer at the email wiesbaden2018@bfs.admin.ch and to the session leader (Merja.Rantala@ec.europa.eu ) by 15 May 2018.

Session 7

Quality and Coverage of Statistical Business Registers

Session leader: Pierrette SCHUHL, Department on business registers, infrastructures and structural statistics, INSEE, France

Statistical Business Registers (SBR) have a very important role in economic statistics. The quality of statistics produced on the basis of the SBR depends directly on the quality of the register (especially in terms of coverage) either because the survey frame is derived from the register or because it allows to set up micro data linking procedures.

In the process of maintenance of an SBR data from several sources are collected, processed, stored and provided to users in the statistical departments of the statistical offices. A sometimes dazzling array of information – taken from existing sources (e.g. administrative data), from SBR surveys, from contributions of survey departments and from commercial providers – has to be transformed and harmonised into a well organised information backbone.

National Statistical Institutes invest a lot in the quality of their SBR – but can users assess this quality and use register data appropriately? Do users of the SBR give feedback about their experiences with SBR quality and do they contribute the additional knowledge they gather from surveys that are based on SBR frames? What are the risks of using survey data to improve the quality of the SBR? What criteria should be applied to add a new source to update the SBR?

Contributions are invited and encouraged on a range of topics and issues related to the Quality in SBR, including (but not limited to)

• Quality measurement
• Quality reports
• Management of respondents’ burden
• Practical experiences

Please submit an abstract of your paper to the conference organizer at the email wiesbaden2018@bfs.admin.ch and to the session leader (pierrette.schuhl@insee.fr) by 15 May 2018.

Session 8

Output of Statistical Business Registers

Session Leader – Roland STURM, Head of Section Profiling, Enterprise Groups, Statistical Units, Federal Statistical Office Germany – Destatis

The crucial role of the Statistical Business Register (SBR) as an infrastructure for survey conduction is unquestioned. For some years also the increasing importance of the SBR as backbone for data sharing and data combination – in order to achieve integrated statistical systems – has been recognised and tackled by the Wiesbaden Group. For these purposes the SBR collects and processes data from several sources – thereby produces a compilation of statistical micro data – and provides it to users in the statistical departments of the statistical offices.

This compilation of data – taken from existing sources (e.g. administrative data), from SBR surveys and from contributions of other surveys – could also be employed to produce statistical output of the SBR itself. As already practiced, the SBR can be employed to generate information on the structure and the demography of the population of enterprises. Furthermore, in combination with other administrative registers or statistical data sources, the SBR can produce additional statistical information. Also geocoding in the SBR may trigger new statistical products generated from the SBR.

This session focuses on statistical outputs generated from the Statistical Business Register. Contributions are invited and encouraged that tackle aspects like:

• What outputs are produced from your SBR and how are these disseminated?
• What is the role of these outputs from SBR in your statistical system?
• How do SBR publications fit into the dissemination strategy of your statistical system?

Please submit an abstract of your paper to the conference organizer at the email wiesbaden2018@bfs.admin.ch and to the session leader (roland.sturm@destatis.de) by 15 May 2018.