History

"The European Network for Better Establishment Statistics (ENBES) is the network which organises European Establishment Statistics Workshops. ENBES was launched in 2009 at a meeting during the New Techniques and Technologies for Statistics Conference in Brussels. ENBES is dedicated to improving cooperation and sharing knowledge on theory, methodology and practices within European establishment statistics. “Establishment” is used with a similar definition to that in the International Conference on Establishment Surveys (ICES) conference series to refer to businesses, farms, hospitals, schools and other similar institutions, for which there was no pre-existing generic term in English (Cox and Chinnappa, 1995).

ENBES encourages cooperation on and development of the methods and practices for enterprise statistics, primarily through a biennial series of multi-day workshops: 2009 in Stockholm, 2011 in Neuchâtel, 2013 in Nuremberg, 2015 in Poznań, and 2017 in Southampton. It also holds occasional one-day workshops, which are usually devoted to a specific theme.

Since 2013 ENBES has been affiliated to the Royal Statistical Society in the UK, whose continuing organisational support has allowed it to operate without the need for a formal organisational registration.

ENBES’s biennial workshops provide an opportunity for discussion of the methodologies and practices of business statistics, covering a variety of different topics. They are designed to allow more space for development of ideas and discussions than a traditional conference, to encourage progress in business statistics through the synergy of the participants. The chapters in this volume derive from the ENBES workshop which took place from 30 August to 1 September 2017 in Southampton, UK, and have allowed the authors an opportunity to further develop the ideas which were presented there. "

Paul A. Smith

From the chapter "Introduction"

In The Unit Problem and Other Current Topics in Business Survey Methodology

Reprinted by kind permission of the publisher

The previous membership of the Steering Committee is preserved on this page.