Definition: Business demography

Category: Business demography

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 by any statistical unit, however, a clear political interest in Europe is on enterprise demography.

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.

The demography of local units could be assessed in a similar way as for enterprises, though this is not common. In many non-European countries demography of establishments is produced regularly. Some European countries are also interested in the demography of local kind-of-activity units.

Discussion of the demography of enterprise groups is only in a starting phase, but it may become important in the future. There are some clear differences with enterprise demography. Births and deaths of enterprise groups are less important than other events: mergers, take-overs, break-ups and split-offs. http://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/ramon/statmanuals/files/KS-32-10-216-EN-C-EN.pdf Eurostat and OECD,  "Eurostat - OECD Manual on Business Demography Statistics" (Edition 2007)