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The EGR and the profiling: a complete vision of the multinational enterprise groups, global actors of the economy

Keywords: globalisation, enterprise groups, statistical units, coordination, consistency, Europe

The EuroGroups Register (EGR) is the statistical register of multinational groups created by the cooperation between Eurostat (the statistical agency of the European Commission) and the statistical authorities of European Member States and EFTA countries. It contains information on the legal and economic structure of the 10000 largest multinational enterprise groups that are acting in Europe (EU+EFTA).

The EGR system was settled down in 2009 (reference year 2008) to support the development of statistics on globalisation and is now performing its fourth cycle on reference year 2011 with the contribution of business register staff in the National Statistical Institutes (NSIs) of the EU and EFTA countries.

The EGR is foreseen to become the platform that supports the production of micro-based statistics on globalisation in Europe, both on country and European level.

One of the main objectives of EGR version 2 (V2) is enabling statisticians and register staff of NSIs and of National Central Banks (NCBs) to consult, to retrieve and to update EGR data. In the meanwhile, lessons were drawn from the experience of the first cycles in order to improve significantly the supply of the database.

Alongside with the EGR developments Eurostat has been supporting the development of a methodology to define in the frame of the global enterprise groups economic entities relevant for statistics both at the global and national level. This methodology is called "profiling" and results in the definition of new statistical units: the global and truncated enterprise.

The two projects are closely related; synergies have been explored and will find concrete conclusions in the share of information produced in both projects.

This paper is aimed to present the role of the EGR in the European statistics on globalisation, its principles, new features and tools. The profiling process, the interactions between the actors and the features will be exposed as well as the foreseen interaction with the EGR and the consequences it would have on the quality of statistics on globalisation.