Secondary confidentiality in European business statistics Item 3.1 Wim Kloek, Eurostat

From the Eurostat perspective Standard SDC-tools cannot be applied directly as the treatment of the national cells is given Very skewed distributions because of country size and industrial structure Often no information on the reasons of confidentiality of the national cells Several EU aggregates to be considered: EU, EA in different compositions The confidentiality flag is used for other purposes than statistical confidentiality

Confidentiality Charters A domain specific agreement on how to deal with statistical confidentiality, notably for the EU-totals Based on an agreed template Contributes to transparency in the ESS and to harmonisation over statistical domains Advice to create (or update) the Confidentiality Charter with the revision of production systems

Confidentiality Charter Pesticides Recently adopted Charter for Pesticide statistics in implementation phase A new idea was introduced: present the total of the non-confidential cells in case this total is at least 95% of the real total (the difference is negligible) The implementation of this rule is less straightforward as expected. There can be conflicts between higher and lower level totals. In which case the higher level totals will get priority.

Questions for discussion How to improve the metadata flow? Reasons for confidentiality at the national level Avoid mixing statistical confidentiality with data quality or non-availability of data at the national level Suppression is more and more difficult to manage with dissemination at national and international level, tailor made tables and abundant public information. Which directions are available?