Economic Activity Survey
CONTACT
Assistant Director
Economic Activity Surveys
Australian Bureau of Statistics, Sydney
Telephone (02) 9268 4219
Facsimile (02) 9268 4276
DESCRIPTION
The Economic Activity Survey (EAS) is an annual collection involving a sample of approximately 20,000 businesses, including both employing and non-employing businesses. Primarily a source of data for national accounting purposes, it collects some data on the use of external training services, as well as on total income, expenditure and employment details. Although it has a large sample, only the 500 businesses with the highest expenditure in certain categories are asked detailed questions on an annual basis. While required to fill out some basic details each year, other businesses are only included in the most detailed collection on a four yearly rotating basis. For the other three years, their expenditure for particular items is pro-rated based on their total expenditure in the year for which detailed data are collected. Expenditure on external training services is only gathered from a subset of the total EAS sample.
From 2002-03, the scope of EAS has been expanded to include businesses primarily engaged in agriculture, forestry and fishing. EAS has additional scope exclusions however. The most notable exception is organisations classified to the General Government sector, that is, all government departments, offices and other bodies whose production costs are mainly financed from public revenues and which provide goods and services to the general public. Other industry groups excluded from the scope of EAS include Finance and Insurance, Education, Community services, Religious organisations, and Public order and Safety Services industries. Government-owned public trading enterprises - such as Telstra and Australia Post - are, however, included. In some cases, data for businesses are collected by external agencies (such as ABARE for agricultural data) and merged with EAS data for output. These sources provide similar data items to EAS so that, for all businesses in scope for EAS, training services information is available.
EAS experimental expenditure estimates have been published at the 4-digit industry level, for selected industries (Australian Industry, cat. no. 8155.0), with the responses for fees paid to external providers coded to the category 'Staff training expenses'. The latest data available are for 2000-01. The next two years of data are expected to be released in late 2004.
For further information see the Directory of Statistical Sources.
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