Improving the coverage of the Economic Census by integrating the Business Register: a method to measure under-over coverage in the two sources

Abstract

The coverage survey carried out after the 1991 Italian Industrial Census (CIS) showed the limits of the traditional survey technique by estimating an under-coverage error of about 200,000 local units and 400,000 employees, mainly concentrated in the area of small enterprises. The availability of the Italian Business Register (ASIA) made possible to introduce, in the 2001 Census, important innovations, aimed to improve the effectiveness of the survey technique and to achieve an optimal coverage of the observation field: a correction of the Census coverage error through a comparison between the Census outcome and the set of units estimated active in the register at the same date.