The label business survey is typically attached to surveys that concern organizations involved in business activities such as manufacturing, commerce, finance, and other services. Business surveys may be considered a subgroup of establishment surveys. Establishment surveys refer to any formal organization engaged in any kind of productive activities, which also includes schools, hospitals, prisons, and other types of institutions that always or prevalently lack a lucrative purpose.
Surveying businesses serves several aims. Governments use business surveys to collect data for economic indicators within the system of national accounts (e.g., for gross domestic product) and other areas of economic and business statistics. The collected data are quantitative rather than categorical data, and among the quantitative data the continuous type tends to be more frequent than discrete (Cox and Chinnappa 1995). Some examples are revenues, costs, value of imported and exported goods, number of...
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Snijkers, G., Bavdaž, M. (2011). Business Surveys. In: Lovric, M. (eds) International Encyclopedia of Statistical Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-04898-2_625
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