BLUE-ETS (Enterprise and Trade Statistics)


Project details:

Project description :

BLUE-ETS is a project on official business statistics and, specifically, on one of EU NSIs key challenges; that is, providing high quality and robust statistical information, for better policy and socio-economic research, and to support the renewed Lisbon Strategy, while:

  • Reducing the response burden
  • Simplifying and setting priorities
  • Cutting costs on enterprises, that stem from red-tape, over-regulation and duplications
  • Modernizing and re-engineering the methods for the production of statistics
  • Making data collection less burdensome and providing more information.


The Trier research team around Ralf Münnich is coordinating Work Package 6 (WP6): “Enhancing quality of business statistics”. Other partners in WP6 are the Universities of Bologna and Southampton as well as the Italian National Institute of Statistics (ISTAT).
Main objectives of WP6 are to further develop methods to improve the quality of business statistics data. This covers variance estimation and small area methods. In more detail:

  • Improvement of methods in business surveys, especially small area estimation and confidence interval estimation
  • Design versus model-based strategies, including sampling design under unequal probalities and sample selection bias (Gelman, 2007)
  • Other practical issues to consider are missing values and imputations, outliers and extremely skewed distributions for variables of interest
  • Influence of sampling designs on small area estimation methods

The Trier research methods include a large-scale simulation study.