Call for Papers for the Session Nr. 6on
“Multinational Groups”
20th International Roundtable on Business Survey Frames
– Wiesbaden Group on Business Registers, Wiesbaden, Germany
21-26 October 2007
Session Leader – John Perry, UK Office for National Statistics
Globalisation has been one of the recurrent themes in the Roundtable history and many globalisation-related subjects have been dealt with. The main focus has been on enterprise group recording and measurement.
The emphasis has now changed to consideration of the impact of cross-border transactions on the coherence of statistical outputs.
The Cardiff Roundtable included presentations on Eurostat plans for the creation of a register of European Groups. Norway presented similar work in the Nordic countries, while both France and Germany covered development of enterprise groups on their national registers.
Since the Cardiff Roundtable, the expected Eurostat pilot project on creating a system for recording and sharing data relating to enterprise groups that operate in more than one European Union country, the EuroGroups Register, has ended and Eurostat is considering how to develop the resulting systems further.
A conclusion from this project, and from earlier work by the German Monopolkommission in 2004, is that data from private sources such as Dun and Bradstreet and Bureau van Dijk can be used to create and maintain structures for multinational enterprise groups. A further conclusion is that progress can be made only by National Statistical Institutes (NSIs) sharing data. This raises issues of use of private sector data and limitations or opportunities for data sharing that could be explored further.
The developments described above relate to defining a global enterprise group, partitioning it into the constituent parts for each country in which it operates and managing changes in those structure. However, with cross- border transactions becoming increasingly important, Special Purpose Entities (Vehicles) are set up to manage these transactions. This has an impact on national economic statistics and common practices for recording on the business registers and for survey reporting are required to ensure coherence. Examples of cooperation between NSIs in register based data collection could be described.
Other related topics would be experience with use of data for multinational groups from private sources and how to achieveworld wide coverage. If you have experiences in other areas related to multinational enterprise groups that you wish to present at the Roundtable, these can also be considered.
An abstract of your paper is to be submitted to me () and to the organiser () by the end of June 2007.