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NOTES

Introduction

This publication presents counts of businesses sourced from the Australian Bureau of Statistics Business Register (ABSBR).

This publication represents the second update to Counts of Australian Businesses, including Entries and Exits, initially released in February 2007.

This series replaces all previous business counts releases, which can be found on the ABS Business Demography Theme Page through the ABS website <www.abs.gov.au>.

This publication provides new business counts, entries, exits and survival information as at June 2009. The scope of business counts is limited to businesses actively remitting in a GST role. This publication continues to provide counts by selected demographics including industry, geography, institutional sector, type of legal organisation and business size. Business size data is provided by selected annual turnover and employment size ranges. These (employment) data indicate that most Australian businesses are small (95.6%) and that most of Australia's small businesses do not employ any staff (62.7%). The counts in this release are heavily influenced by entry and exits within Australia's small business sector. Users should take this into account when interpreting results, including when comparing these data with other ABS statistics.

There have been some changes to this publication compared with the previous release. As such, the counts presented in this publication are not comparable with those presented in previous releases. On 1 July 2007, there was a change in the GST threshold and as such, the scope of this release is based on the revised threshold of $75,000 per annum for businesses and $150,000 per annum for not for profit institutions. The other changes in this release are focussed on ensuring that users continue to have access to an annual snapshot of Australia's actively trading business population, which remains relevant over time.

One of these changes relates to the inclusion of actively trading businesses that have not yet been classified to an industry, sector and/or Main State of operation through the Australian Business Register (ABR) new business registration process. Historically, due to the statistically insignificant size of the population, such businesses were excluded from the scope of Counts of Australian Businesses, including Entries and Exits. The inclusion of these businesses in the total business counts data provides a more accurate annual snapshot of businesses that were actively trading in the Australian economy. For further information, please refer to paragraph 19 in the Explanatory Notes.

A range of enhancements to the data have also been made to improve the relevance of the publication over time. This includes the provision of industry data (for the first time) using the 2006 version of the Australian and New Zealand Standard Industrial Classification (ANZSIC), the rebasing of all business survival tables to June 2007 and the provision of improved point-in-time business size data (based on employment and annual turnover). These new point-in-time growth tables classify businesses to size ranges according to their size in each respective year. They quantify the movement of surviving businesses in terms of inflow (the total number of businesses that move into a size range from another range) and outflow (the total number of businesses that move out of a size range into another) to arrive at a net movement of surviving businesses figure. For further information on the new growth tables, see the publication's Technical Note on page 39. The Explanatory Notes commencing on Page 25 contain further information about the overall enhancements and changes in the scope of this release.

This publication will be followed by the release of a range of detailed Counts of Australian Businesses, including Entries and Exits datacubes. Each of these datacubes contain industry, geographical and business size dimensions, and offer users access to more detailed cross-classifications.

Due to the fine level information presented, each datacube has been confidentialised to ensure no individual business can be identified. The same confidentiality process has been applied to the data as was applied for the previous (June 2007) release. The datacubes are expected to be released from December 2010 onwards.

It is planned to continue releasing updated counts, including entries and exits, on an annual basis in future. As discussed in Appendix 1, these counts will be further refined over time.

The ABS welcomes feedback from users of these business counts.

To provide feedback or for further information about these and related statistics, contact the National Information and Referral Service on 1300 135 070 or email <client.services@abs.gov.au>.