Advances in Business Statistics, Methods and Data Collection

13Developing Statistical Frameworks for Administrative Data and Integrating It into Business Statistics. Experiences from the UK and New Zealand

Nicholas Cox¹, Craig H. McLaren², Claire Shenton², Tom Tarling², and Ella W. Davies²

¹Statistics NZ, Wellington, New Zealand

²Office for National Statistics, Newport, Wales

13.1 Introduction

13.1.1 Background

The quantity of administrative data that are created, stored, and processed in the world has grown exponentially over recent years. There are several definitions of administrative data but for the purposes of this chapter, the UNECE (2011) definition “Administrative sources are data holdings containing information which is not collected for statistical purposes” is used. This also includes transactional sources such as credit card or store card data. National Statistical Institutes (NSIs) have been repurposing administrative data for decades. The Nordic countries in particular were among the first to use administrative data in the form of population registers for the large‐scale production of official statistics, replacing surveys as the primary data source, and the Danish 1980 Population Census being the first of its kind (Nordbotten 2010).

Administrative data are key to the creation and maintenance of registers (for example, population registers and statistical business registers) and sample frames, and this type of data can be used to better target sample allocation, reduce the required size of samples, or feed directly into ...