Legal units include:
􀁸 Legal persons whose existence is recognised by law independently of the individuals or institutions which may own them or are members of them.
􀁸 Natural persons who are engaged in an economic activity in their own right.
The legal unit is usually recorded in one or more administrative sources. The sources used for statistical business registers do not necessarily provide identical views of legal units. These units can vary both between different sources within a country and between countries. Thus the legal unit is not suitable as a statistical unit, particularly for international comparisons. The characteristics of a legal unit are: it owns goods or assets, it incurs liabilities and it enters into contracts. The legal unit always forms, either by itself or sometimes in combination with other legal units, the basis for the statistical unit known as the "enterprise".