Page 21 - Special Topic Session (STS) - Volume 1

STS339 Takashi IOKA
Figure 1: Outline of the Economic Census

Economic Census for Economic Census for
Business Frame (EC-BF) Business Activity (EC-BA)

 Gathering information  Identifying the situation for
about the business Frame economic activities of
for conducting various businesses.
business statistics.  Focusing on amount of
 Focusing on number of sales, cost, value added, etc.
establishments,
enterprises, employees,
etc.

Main data sources of the Business Register in Japan
(Updated accurately twice in five years)

In the interim between two surveys, BR has been updated regularly
by using the administrative data and other survey results. This method has
been very effective for the maintenance of the BR in Japan.
1.3 New Quality Assurance Frameworks for the Business Register
The economic impact of aging society accompanied by falling child
birth rates, and the rapid changes of the economic and social structure are
advancing in Japan. To deal with those issues, it became more important
than ever before to grasp accurate business trends by improving the
official economic statistics.
In this meantime, in 2016, Prime Minister Shinzo Abe held the 22nd
meeting of the Council on Economic and Fiscal Policy at the Prime
Minister's Office. At the meeting, there was discussion on improvement of
economic statistics, focused on GDP statistics, and the Basic Policy for the
Fundamental Reform of Economic Statistics was decided. In the policy,
effective use of the “Corporate Number” to improve the accuracy of the
official statistics was mentioned.
In 2017, according to the basic policy, the Chief Cabinet Secretary
suggested to use the Corporate Number, and to conduct the Profiling to
improve the quality and coverage of the BR as the basic data source for
the official statistics. The SBJ started to put the Chief Cabinet Secretary’s
suggestion into practice.

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