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

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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.

5. 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?