The national statistical institutes experience the dilemma of being confronted with on the one hand the political demand for reducing the respondent burden and on the othet hand the increasing need for exploring emerging issues such as the consequences of globalization. One way of meeting this challenge is by utilizing existing statistical registers and linking the relevant information at micro level.

This paper presents experiences from a EUROSTAT project on Linking Micro Data on International Sourcing involving statistical institutes from Czech Republic, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, Romania and Slovenia.

The aim of the project was to build a data base with data from the International Sourcing survey, the Structural Business Statistics Register and the International Trade in Goods Register using the unique enterprise ID from the national Business Registers to link data from the period of 2000-2008 on micro level. By combining data from the mentioned sources, four main hypotheses were explored;

1) International sourcing has a negative impact on domestic employment

2) International sourcing implies higher personnel costs per employee domestically (low-skilled jobs are being sourced internationally)

3) International sourcing has a positive impact on value added per employee

4) International sourcing has an influence on the foreign trade patterns

In order to illustrate the behavior of enterprises having performed international sourcing during 2001-2006, a control group with same characteristics (sector, part of enterprise group and exporting or not) was extracted. The performance of the two groups were compared using the variables such as number of employees, personnel costs per employee, value added per employee and amount (value) of foreign trade in goods.

The paper addresses the methodological experiences learned from carrying out a micro data linking project involving several countries with (partly) different statistical production system and presents the main statistical findings of the project.

Keywords: International sourcing; Globalisation; Micro data linking

Biography: Peter Bøegh Nielsen is head of division for business statistics in Statistics Denmark. His area of responsability covers a range of subjects such as structural business statistics, statistics on innovation, research and development and globalisation issues. Peter Bøegh Nielsen has been in charge of several Eurostat projects and was the co-ordinator of the first European survey on international sourcing and the follow-up project on micro data linking.