Data on enterprises are the central building block of business statistics. Through periodical reporting by enterprises statistical conclusions can be drawn on the structure and the development of the domestic economy, in national as well as in international contexts. Enterprise data are available for various areas of economic activities, e.g. foreign trade, retail and wholesale trade, services, manufacturing, construction, transport, etc.
Besides the data presented in this part of the website, enterprise data can be found in other areas (statistical domains) of our homepage, under the headings “Industries and Construction”, “Trade, Services”, “Research and Development, Innovation”, “National Accounts” etc.
Statistics on business demography include data on the population of active enterprises, on births of enterprises, their survival, on deaths of enterprises and on the corresponding employment data. The business demography statistics are compiled according to two concepts: the first approach includes all enterprises, according to the second approach only those enterprises are taken into account which have employees (employer business demography).
A main feature of national economies is the integration of their economic units with the rest of the world. This can be measured, for instance, by the companies’ cross-border investments, be it domestic enterprises’ investments abroad (outflow) or vice versa (inflow). This topic is tightly connected with the phenomenon of (economic) globalisation or the out-sourcing and dislocation of productive resources (off-shoring). A new source of data on this issue is provided by the statistics on the structure and activity of foreign affiliates. These national statistics are produced according to EU standards, starting with data on the reference year 2007.
The Federal Statistics Law 2000 stipulates that the institutions of official statistics have to organise its statistical system in a way that the response burden is as small as possible. Thus, it was seen necessary to investigate into the size of the actual response burden and to develop a system with which the monitoring of the response burden can be undertaken. In the context of the co-operation contract between Statistics Austria and the Austrian Federal Economic Chamber signed in 2001, it was one of the aims to develop a system to monitor the development of the response burden. Based on experience in other countries this monitoring system was named “response burden barometer”. The results of the response burden barometer are published here.