Online Program

The use of administrative data in business statistics: methodological developments (308222)

Keywords: secondary data, measurement errors, coverage errors, estimation errors, reporting errors

Administrative data is a relatively well-defined and structured data source and is therefore an attractive source for business statistics to use on its own or in combination with other sources. On the one hand it is a way to reduce response burden and on the other hand a way to increase output granularity. Despite its advantages, experience with use of administrative data has shown that one should be cautious to view administrative data as a perfect source without measurement error and covering the complete population. In practice a number of issues needs to be dealt with, mainly because of its secondary use in official statistics. The current lecture gives an overview over the key issues and some of the methods that have been developed to deal with them. In the presentation we will give a number of typical examples of issues that we have been dealt with that may occur when administrative data is used as a direct source to estimate output for business statistics, focusing on experiences at Statistics Netherlands. The joint lecture by Danni Lewis will supplement the examples by dealing with some other issues, using experiences from the Office of National Statistics.