The development of the UK annual business inquiry - ARCHIVED

This paper discusses in detail issues dealing with the technical aspects of designing and conducting surveys. It is intended for an audience of survey methodologists.

This paper describes the Annual Business Inquiry (ABI) project to integrate the Office for National Statistics' (ONS) main, annual business surveys, regardless of economic sectors. The ABI project also brings together employment and financial data surveys and is capable of generating a wide range of subnational analyses, another objective of the development. Methodological aspects covered by the paper include sample design; estimation and outlier treatment; apportionment of data from reporting units to local units (individual sites) and the methodology for subnational and small area estimation. The subnational methodology involves the use of logistic and loglinear models.