Advances in Business Statistics, Methods and Data Collection

10Managing Response Burden for Official Statistics Business Surveys – Experiences and Recent Developments at Statistics Netherlands, Statistics Portugal, and Statistics Sweden

Johan Erikson¹, Deirdre Giesen², Leanne Houben², and Paulo Saraiva³

¹Statistics Sweden, Örebro, Sweden

²Statistics Netherlands, Heerlen, The Netherlands

³Statistics Portugal, Lisbon, Portugal

10.1 Introduction

Much of the data required for official statistics is still collected directly from businesses. Some businesses, especially – but not exclusively – the larger ones, receive frequent and recurring mandatory data requests from National Statistical Institutes (NSIs). The time and effort required to comply with these data requests can be a real burden for businesses. This burden may appear in terms of time and/or money spent on reporting and/or in terms of a more subjective “irritation burden,” if respondents do not find the reporting user friendly or do not see the usefulness of data requests.

Survey organizations are well aware of the importance of managing response burden. They know that if burden is considered too high by respondents, it may impact unit and item nonresponse, measurement errors (e.g. Bavdaž 2010), and statistical agency costs (e.g. need for more reminders or data cleaning, Giesen 2012; Berglund et al. 2013). Also, governments around the world are concerned with capping regulatory costs (Renda et al. 2019; OECD 2014), and the costs of mandatory reporting to NSIs are part of these costs. ...