An Overview of Selected International Business Record Linkage Programs

Although the record linkage of business data is not a completely new topic, the fact remains that the public and many data users are unaware of the programs and practices commonly used by statistical agencies across the world.

This report is a brief overview of the main practices, programs and challenges of record linkage of statistical agencies across the world who answered a short survey on this subject supplemented by publically available documentation produced by these agencies. The document shows that the linkage practices are similar between these statistical agencies; however the main differences are in the procedures in place to access to data along with regulatory policies that govern the record linkage permissions and the dissemination of data.