Blue-ets

The BLUE-ETS (Blue-Enterprise and Trade Statistics) project is funded by the European Commission 7th Framework Programme (Theme 8: Socio-economic Sciences and Humanities) and involves many partners from the Universities of Southampton, Bologna, Ljubljana, Naples, Trier and Bergamo, the NSIs of Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Sweden and Slovenia and research institutes in Slovakia, Belgium and Germany. The focus of the project is on official statistics and, specifically, on one of EU NSIs key challenges; that is, providing high quality and robust statistical information for business and trade statistics to ensure better policy and socio-economic research, and to support the renewed ‘Lisbon Strategy’, while

• reducing the response burden
• simplifying and setting priorities
• cutting costs on enterprises, that stem from red-tape, over-regulation and duplications
• modernising and re-engineering the methods for the production of statistics
• making data collection less burdensome and providing more information

Blue-Ets is targeted to the following objectives:

1. Major Challenges and Opportunities for Business Statistics:

• Grasping change: priorities and opportunities for statistics and adapting Business Statistics to new developments
• Availing of new technologies to collect, manage, access and use enterprise statistics: a systemic approach
• Statistics and indicators

2 Adapt Business Statistics to New Needs: 

• Catching change on the making
• Streamlining all business statistics
• Meet the demand for more and better statistics

3 Make Better Use of Data that Already Exist:

• Building ‘sectoral/ thematic’ knowledge databases
• Exploiting administrative sources and accounting data
• Integrate sources and simplify reporting
• Promoting the integration of statistical reporting inside the enterprise
• Addressing methodological and estimation issues at source level

4 Collecting Data:

• Smarter, simpler ways of collecting data
• New and more effective ways and means for business data collection
• Better and more efficient use of IT tools to transfer data from enterprise to NSIs
• Collecting versus accessing and transferring data from sources

5 Methodological Problems and Issues:

• Business data consistency, coordination and management
• Harmonising definitions across the board
• Methodological studies on linking and merging data from different sources; optimal allocation of sample sizes; cut off samples combined use with other sources and related estimation methods; reduce burden on businesses; small areas, spatial, mapping and neighbourhoods data