Profiling: a New Way to Increase the Quality of Statistics on Research and Development.

Currently, statistics on Research and Development (R&D) carried out in the business sector are computed in France on the sole basis of legal units: firstly, a survey is addressed to them to collect the data and then, statistics on R&D are disseminated at legal unit level. Considering the increasing importance of the enterprise group in the French economy, it seems difficult today to go on using only the legal units to calculate business statistics. Indeed, assimilating the legal unit to the enterprise is not relevant anymore for group's affiliates and subsidiaries. Taking into account the European definition of an enterprise will help to disseminate more consistent and relevant R&D statistics on the business sector. The French business statistical register established by the French National Statistical Institute (INSEE), called SIRUS, contains notably all the legal units and all the enterprises. The main contribution of this register is to make possible the calculation and dissemination of statistics at another level than the legal unit one: the enterprise level. This article first describes why the data should go on being collected at the legal unit level and not at the enterprise one. Indeed, it seems that such a change in the data collection can be dangerous because it could result in a substantial increase of the response burden. Then, this article presents the process based on SIRUS that leads to the computation of key indicators on R&D at enterprise level. To conclude, it compares these key indicators with the ones calculated at the legal unit level to show the impact of moving to the enterprise level on French R&D statistics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]