Statistical Terms Glossary

The legal form (also known as legal status) is defined according to national legislation. It is useful for eliminating ambiguity in identification searches and as the possible criterion for selection or stratification for surveys. It is also used for defining the institutional sector. Statistics according to legal form are produced e.g. in business demography. The character of legal or natural person is decisive in fiscal terms, because the tax regime applicable to the unit depends on this. It means that any statistical register fed with fiscal records will have that information. Experience has shown that
legal form will often be useful to make adjustments to information collection processes and questionnaires on the legal unit operating an enterprise. A code representing the legal form should therefore be recorded in accordance with the classification of legal forms or categories. The following legal forms can be found in most countries:
􀁸 Sole proprietorship: Enterprise owned exclusively by one natural person.
􀁸 Partnership: Association of persons who conduct a business under a collective name. It can take the form of a limited partnership.
􀁸 Limited liability companies: Enterprises comprising joint-stock companies, limited partnerships with share capital and private limited company.
􀁸 Co-operative societies: These are bodies set down by law in each country. They observe a number of general principles, for example they may only be entitled to provide their services to members, profits are often distributed in proportion to members' dealings with the society, etc.
􀁸 Non-profit institutions
􀁸 Enterprises with other forms of legal constitution: This group includes non taxative nationalised industries in form of publicly-owned enterprises and state or local authority monopolies.

The term "legal person" corresponds to all forms of legal construction organised by the constitution and laws of countries and endowed with rights and obligations characteristic of legal personality.

Juridical aspects under which an agricultural holding is operated.

According to the personal status law, it is the person who legally represents the minor or the quarantined one in court and represents him/her in all legal matters and financial transactions; it is usually the father. The legal tutor, supported by the religious laws, is responsible for guarding the person and his/her money. The concept of the guardian is the same in all sects: Christians consider it to be granted to the father, then to the mother after the father's death, provided that she doesn’t remarry (Article 184 of Catholic communities Law). For Sunnis, it’s granted to the father, then grandfather, brother, uncle (from father’s side) and then the relatives. For Shi’ites, it’s granted to the father, then to the grandfather and then to the person appointed by one of them. Penal Code punishes the legal tutor who commits a crime against the ward by dropping their authority, as the Code of Obligations and Contracts considers the guardian responsible for compensation of any damage caused by the guarded person.

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".

It applies if the person-aged 14 years has an official marriage document (issued by a competent court) but has not been actually married yet according to customs and traditions applicable in the country. The divorced, widowed, and married twice do not belong to this category.

The definition of a legitimate fisher will vary from one fishery to the other. A legitimate fisher is one that is recognized and managed as such by the management system.

The formal investing of a person with the status and rights of a person born in wedlock, according to the laws of each country.

Lemons is used in the literature on capital measurement to mean defective capital goods. It is sometimes alleged that prices of second hand assets are biased downwards because buyers assume that the sellers are disposing of their defective assets or “lemons".

See loan into arrears.

One of the functions and a major raison d'etre of a modern central bank whereby the bank has to provide liquid assets to the banking system when the existing liquid assets of the banking system threaten to deplete.

Lender that has the official commitment for a loan.

The amount of money that the Bank can lend, based on its paid-in capital.

The maximum amount that an organization can lend.