Group Experts on Business Registers by UNECE, Eurostat, and OECD – Paris 27 – 29 September 2017
The international meeting of the Group of Experts on Business Registers, which is organised every two years, was held on 27 to 29 September 2017 at OECD headquarters in Paris. The event was organised jointly by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UNECE), Eurostat and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD).
The meeting gathered a total of 105 participants from a number of countries, with a majority from Europe and Asia. For the first time, South Mediterranean countries were present, with the financial support of the MEDSTAT IV project (one participant per country).
The topics discussed and debated during the meeting of the business registers experts were very diverse. The main points addressed were the following:
- Locating and registering family businesses: the cases of Spain (950,000 units) and the Netherlands (1.6 million units).
- A probabilistic model for estimating the life expectancy of businesses (survival): the case of Mexico.
- Profiling large multinational enterprise groups: the cases of France (INSEE), Germany, Australia, and at the level of EUROSTAT beginning in 2008. Manual and automatic profiling.
- Geo-spatial information: the case of China which has 200,000 enumerators using geo-localised PDAs to ensure real time transmission of locations and statistics on 18 million businesses.
- The RIAD (Register of Institutions and Affiliates Databases) and GLEIF (Global Legal Enterprises Identifier Foundation) platforms were discussed by the European Central Bank. The latter covers 450,000 units and 6,000 groups of units (as of September, 2017). The users of these platforms are the central banks of European countries and European authorities.
- Data Quality and Register Quality indicators, discussed by EUROSTAT. Standardising the indicators at the level of the European countries.
- Measuring the economic weight of multinational corporations established in Tunisia based on the statistical business directory, thanks to an econometric model discussed by the representative of Tunisia.
The next meeting of the group of experts will take place in Mexico City in 2019. The topics proposed for the meeting, as presented by UNECE’s representative, are:
- SBR’s role in the modernisation of statistical production.
- The use of administrative sources: developing links.
- The users’ viewpoint
- Definition of statistical units
- Globalisation
- Business demography
Suggestions from the participants:
- IT tools
- Legalisation and confidentiality
- Security
- Geocoding
The next meeting of the group of experts on SBR WIESBADEN (Wiesbaden group of experts on business register) is scheduled for September 2018 in Switzerland. The representative of the group asked the participants to send in their suggestions of topics for the meeting.
An useful link: https://www.unece.org/index.php?id=44252
