Methodology for the Use of Administrative Data in Business Statistics

Abstract

Public administrative data and data from business administrations are now widely available. These administrative data can be used in the process of making official business statistics. The current chapter focuses on the direct use of the values in the administrative data for output estimates, both as single source and as multisource statistics. Since each administrative data set is targeted for its own, administrative use, their direct use in official statistics often requires adaptations of the data, the units and the population to the targeted ones. Although each situation is unique, and there is no standard recipe that can be followed, there are different approaches and methods that have been developed over the years for the use and processing of administrative data. In this chapter, we give an overview of aims to achieve when producing official statistics with administrative data, and some typical practical issues associated with those aims. For each of those issues, we summarize the current state-of-the-art methods for dealing with them. We illustrate them and give references to situations in various countries where these methods have been applied. We end this chapter by discussing unsolved issues in the field.