The French Unified System of Business Statistics

Abstract

The French Unified System of Business Statistics brings together information from the two major sources of structural business statistics: tax declarations and annual business surveys. The aim of the system is to improve the quality of the two sources by checking their consistency (internal, longitudinal and intersources consistencies). The originality of the system is that it entails processing at the individual level. It gives rise to a rather long and complicated implementation. Thus the data relating to financial year N undergo a series of processing operations (matchings, reinsertions, confrontation) ending three years later in N+3. A brief assessment of the value added by the system shows sizeable improvements. The future development of the system will be toward greater consistency, and the introduction of a temporal dimension is also envisaged.