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Eligibility status in Business Surveys – How to get the information and how to use it

Keywords: Eligibility status , questionnaire design, follow-up

Business registers and other sources for the sampling frame construction are inevitably infected with different errors and deficiencies. These imperfections can result in the fact that the part of the observed units is not eligible for our purposes (e.g. non-active units, misclassified units). It is important that the share of these units is reduced as much as possible and that most of these units are identified properly and promptly.

At SORS a lot of effort has been put in recent year to tackle this problem. These activities were taking part in different steps of the statistical process (e.g. questionnaire design, follow-up activities). In the paper we give the overview of all these activities and present their outcomes, achieved so far. In the first part of the paper we present the eligibility status code list, which is used for the harmonized monitoring of the eligibility of the business entities. The central part of the paper is devoted to the description of afore mentioned activities in different part of the process, where we also point out the main obstacles and challenges. In the last part of the paper we draw some conclusions and indicate the future activities.