QUALITY DECLARATION - SUMMARY
INSTITUTIONAL ENVIRONMENT
The statistics presented in this release are compiled from the 2013-14 Business Characteristics Survey (BCS). The BCS is conducted under the authority of the Census and Statistics Act 1905.
For information on the institutional environment of the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), including the legislative obligations of the ABS, financing and governance arrangements, and mechanisms for scrutiny of ABS operations, please see ABS Institutional Environment.
RELEVANCE
The Growth Sectors are at the centre of the Government's industry strategy are expected to be of central importance to Australian economic prosperity in the coming decades. These statistics will provide a baseline understanding of the current status of businesses in these sectors and to develop a means of measuring their performance in the future, to provide information required for policy development and implementation.
TIMELINESS
The reference period for most of the characteristics items included in the 2013-14 BCS is during the year ended 30 June 2014 or as at 30 June 2014.
The 2013-14 BCS forms were despatched to businesses from late October through to early November 2014. Key indicators related to use of IT and innovation in Australian business are published within 12 months of the end of the reference period. Subsequent, and more detailed, releases are published in the 2-3 months after the first release.
ACCURACY
The ABS aims to produce high quality data from its industry collections, while minimising the reporting burden on businesses. To achieve this, extensive effort is put into survey and questionnaire design, collection procedures and processing.
The approach to quality assurance for the production of Growth Sector statistics aims to make the best use of ABS resources to meet user prioritised requirements, both in terms of data quality and timing of release. The approach specifies the level and degree to which each data item is quality assured, noting that only some of the total output is able to be quality assured to the highest standards. Different priorities are assigned to groups of data items, with highest priority being assigned to key point in time data on business use of IT and innovation.
Businesses selected in the 2013-14 Growth Sectors sample had a response rate of 96%.
In this publication, indications of sampling variability are measured by relative standard errors (RSEs). The relative standard error is a useful measure in that it provides an immediate indication of the percentage errors likely to have occurred due to sampling, and thus avoids the need to refer to the size of the estimate. To annotate proportion estimates, a value of 50% has been used in the calculation of RSE rather than the estimated proportion from the survey data. This avoids inconsistencies between the way very low and very high proportions are annotated. Relative standard errors for estimates in this publication have been calculated using the actual standard error and the survey estimate (referred to as x) in the following manner: RSE%(x) = (SE(x)*100)/50
For more information about the sampling errors, please refer to the Technical Note for this release.
COHERENCE
There are established international frameworks or reporting models for the collection of use of IT and innovation data (i.e. the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) ICT Use by Businesses model questionnaire and OSLO manual: Guidelines for Collecting and Interpreting Innovation Data, 3rd Edition respectively). The application of these in ABS collections is in the context of the Australian situation and, for some elements, it is not appropriate to adhere to the international framework, although they are used, where possible, in the BCS.
The System of National Accounts and the Australian Accounting Standards are used for directly collected or administrative data as appropriate. The survey uses Standard Question Wording (which are used in most ABS economic business-based collections) to collect standard financial data items. A core set of characteristics questions have been developed.
INTERPRETABILITY
Further information on the technical aspects (including item definitions) associated with the statistics from the BCS can be found in the Explanatory Notes and Glossary associated with this release.
ACCESSIBILITY
Outputs from the 2013-14 BCS will be available in the following suite of electronic releases and associated data cubes:
Summary of IT Use and Innovation in Selected Growth Sectors, Australia, 2013-14 (cat. no. 8166.0.80.001), released 18 June 2015
Summary of IT Use and Innovation in Australian Business, 2013-14 (cat. no. 8166.0), released 18 June 2015
Business Use of Information Technology, 2013-14 (cat. no. 8129.0), to be released 16 July 2015;
Selected Characteristics of Australian Business, 2013-14 (cat. no. 8167.0), to be released 20 August 2015; and
Characteristics of Businesses in Selected Growth Sectors, Australia, 2013-14 (cat. no. 8170.0) to be released 20 August 2015.
These are available free of charge from the
ABS Website.
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