Integrating Business Surveys: guidelines and principles based on the Belgian experience

In the past few years the modernization of business surveys has been extensively discussed by several NSI’s in Europe. The MEETS program (Modernisation of European Enterprise and Trade Statistics) has been recently launched for the years 2008-2013 by EUROSTAT for encouraging the reform process at the European level in order to identify new areas for business statistics, to enhance the integration of data collection and treatment and to improve the harmonization of methods and concepts in business statistics. At Statistics Belgium the debate has been brought especially through a revision of concepts and methods in business surveys with the aim of reducing the survey costs for the Administration and the response burden for the enterprises. In the present contribution, the issue of integration of business surveys is tackled with a variable-oriented approach and using classification techniques.