Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development

The business tendency survey indicators cover a standard set of indicators for four economic sectors: manufacturing, construction, retail trade and other services. This includes an indicator of overall business conditions or business confidence in each sector. The consumer opinion survey indicators cover a restricted set of indicators on consumer confidence, expected economic situation and price expectations.   Business and consumer opinion (tendency) surveys provide qualitative information that has proved useful for monitoring the current economic situation. Typically they are based on a sample of enterprises or households and respondents are asked about their assessments of the current situation and expectations for the immediate future. For enterprise surveys this concerns topics such as production, orders, stocks etc. and in the case of consumer surveys their intentions concerning major purposes, economic situation now compared with the recent past and expectations for the immediate future. Many survey series provide advance warning of turning points in aggregate economic activity as measured by GDP or industrial production. Such series are known as leading indicators in cyclical analysis. These types of survey series are widely used as component series in composite leading indicators.   The main characteristic of these types of surveys is that instead of asking for exact figures, they usually ask for the direction of change e.g. a question on tendency by reference to a “normal” state, e.g. of production level. Possible answers are generally of the three point scale type e.g. up/same/down or above normal/normal/below normal for enterprise surveys and of the five point scale type e.g. increase sharply/increase slightly/remain the same/fall slightly/fall sharply for consumer surveys. In presenting the results as a time series, only the balance is shown. That is “same” or “normal” answers are ignored and the balance is obtained by taking the difference between percentages of respondents giving favourable and unfavourable answers.   Virtually all business tendency and consumer opinion survey data are presented as time series of balances in this dataset, either in raw or seasonally adjusted form. Very few series are presented as indices, and where these exist they have generally been converted from underlying balances by countries before submitting the data to the OECD.

This dataset presents number of importing/exporting enterprises and their trade value (in millions of USD) by size class, and economic activity expressed in ISIC Rev.4.

The ICT Access and Usage by Businesses database provides a selection of 59 indicators, based on the 2nd revision of the OECD Model Survey on ICT Access and Usage by Businesses.

Main Economic Indicators (MEI) provides a wide range of indicators on recent economic developments in the 35 OECD member countries and 15 non-member countries. The indicators published in MEI have been prepared by national statistical agencies primarily to meet the requirements of users within their own country. In most instances, the indicators are compiled in accordance with international statistical guidelines and recommendations. However, national practices may depart from these guidelines, and these departures may impact on comparability between countries.

This dataset reports data on pharmaceutical consumption and sales, according to the Anatomical Therapeutic Chemical (ATC) classification, and on the share of generics in the pharmaceutical market.

DUE TO CHANGES IN THE METHODOLOGY THE 2018 PMR VALUES CANNOT BE COMPARED WITH PREVIOUS VINTAGES. The 2018 OECD Indicators of Product Market Regulation (PMR) are a comprehensive and internationally-comparable set of indicators that measure the degree to which laws and policies promote or inhibit competition in areas of the product and service market where competition is viable. These indicators measure the de iure regulatory environments in 34 OECD countries and in a set of non-OECD countries in 2018. The economy-wide indicators cover the extent to which the involvement of the state in the economy can generate distortions to competition and the level of the barriers to entry and expansion to domestic and foreign firms in different sectors of the economy. Users of the data must be aware that they may no longer fully reflect the current situation in fast reforming countries.

Demand for statistics on business demography has grown and developed considerably in recent years. Data on births and deaths of enterprises, their life expectancy and the important role they play in economic growth and productivity, as well as the information they provide for tackling social demographic issues, are increasingly requested by policy makers and analysts alike. Business demography is a core element of the OECD’s Entrepreneurship Indicators Project, where the OECD and Eurostat are collaborating to develop a framework for the regular and harmonised measurement of entrepreneurial activity and the factors that enhance or impede it. The data in this database is presented in International Standard of Industrial Classification (ISIC Revision 4).

The OECD Secretariat collects a wide range of statistics on businesses and business activity. This database features the data collection of the Statistics Directorate relating to a number of key variables, such as value added, operating surplus, employment, and the number of business units, for example, broken down by 4-digit International Standard of Industrial Classification (ISIC Revision 4) industry groups (including the service sector)), referred to as the Structural Statistics on Industry and Services (SSIS) database; and by size class; referred to as the Business Statistics by Size Class (BSC) database.

Since new and young firms contribute critically to job creation, innovation and growth, observing recent trends of firm formation provides valuable information to policy makers. Seasonal adjustment: For the purpose of presentation of quarterly series, seasonal adjustment is applied using TramoSeats algorithm with 5 regressors: log/level, trading days, Easter, outlier detection, and automatic model identification). Series are log-transformed and decomposed into a trend component. Finally, index is calculated based on a 2007 (2007 = average of 2007 quarters) in order to present movements between the base year and a given quarter.

The central issue of trade by enterprise characteristics is to disaggregate trade flows according the characteristics of the enterprises engaged in cross-border transactions. The feasibility of doing so largely depends on the possibility of using or developing common identifiers between the trade register and the business register. Countries differ in their ability to perform such a linking, and matching ratios (between business and trade registers) vary across countries, and as a consequence the degree of representativeness of the results also varies across countries.

This table presents export/import information by enterprise size class and partner country.

The central issue of trade by enterprise characteristics is to disaggregate trade flows according the characteristics of the enterprises engaged in cross-border transactions. The feasibility of doing so largely depends on the possibility of using or developing common identifiers between the trade register and the business register. Countries differ in their ability to perform such a linking, and matching ratios (between business and trade registers) vary across countries, and as a consequence the degree of representativeness of the results also varies across countries.