Business demography covers events, like births and other creations of units, deaths and other cessations of units, and their ratio to the business population. It covers follow-up of units in time dimension, thus gaining information on their survival or discontinuity. It also covers development in time dimension according to certain characteristics like size, thus gaining information on the growth of units, or a cohort of units, by type of activity. Demographic information can in principle be produced for any statistical unit; however, a clear political interest in Europe is on enterprise demography. In other regions business demography data are often calculated based on establishments. The demography of enterprises can be assessed by studying enterprise births and enterprise deaths and by examining the change in the number of enterprises by type of activity, i.e. by examining the flows and stocks to get a complete picture of the enterprise dynamism.
Term:
Business demography
Definition:
Domain:
Statistical Business Registers
Source:
European Commission (Eurostat), Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), "Eurostat – OECD Manual on Business Demography Statistics", Methodologies and Working papers, Publication Office of the European Communities, Luxembourg, 2007.