All Times ET
Program is Subject to Change
TBD
Integrating Administrative Data Into Business Statistics (307984)
Craig H. McLaren, Office for National Statistics*Gemma Rabaiotti, Office for National Statistics
Laura Requena, Office for National Statistics
Matthew Whipple, Office for National Statistics
Hannah White, Office for National Statistics
Keywords: administrative data, business surveys, tax data
The Office for National Statistics (ONS) has continued to expand the use of administrative data in the production of economic statistics. Administrative data, other than Value Added Tax (VAT) turnover, is already used widely within short-term indicators, particularly for Index of Services (IoS) but also in some Index of Production (IoP) elements, and separate administrative sources for Construction estimates. In recent years, there has been an increased focus on the use of data from Value Added Tax (VAT) returns to reduce the dependency on sample surveys while also giving the opportunity to significantly reduce respondent burden and take advantage of the larger number of companies in the administrative data set.
The strategic use of the VAT data source has been an important step in transforming data sources within the ONS but has provided some challenging methodological issues.
This paper focuses on the challenges we have identified, and methods used to overcome them, for the use of VAT data within the short-term economic indicators: construction output, Index of Production (IoP), Index of Services (IoS), retail sales and regional estimates.