The e-Business Survey 2003 covered 10 sectors of the economy and 25 European countries. It was carried out in two parts. The first part consisted of 3,515 telephone interviews with decision-makers in enterprises from five EU countries which were conducted in March 2003. The second part had a scope of 4,570 interviews in the EU, 100 interviews in Norway and 2,632 interviews in the 10 new EU Member States and was conducted in November 2003. The databases offered for download in the table below contain the data from both parts of the survey for each sector.
| No. |
Data by sector |
Download database (*.xls) |
| 01 |
Manufacture of textile, wearing apparel and footwear products |
336 KB |
| 02 |
Manufacture of chemicals and chemical products |
238 KB * |
| 03 |
Manufacture of electrical machinery and electronics |
251 KB * |
| 04 |
Manufacture of transport equipment |
249 KB * |
| 05 |
Retail |
276 KB * |
| 06 |
Tourism |
268 KB * |
| 07 |
Telecommunications and computer-related services |
243 KB * |
| 08 |
Business services |
250 KB |
| 09 |
Health and social services |
233 KB * |
| 10 |
Craft and Trade |
754 KB |
| |
Cross-sector and regional comparisons |
Download database (*.xls) |
| SEC |
Cross-sector comparison for ten sectors based on the aggregate of five EU countries (DE, ES, FR, IT, UK) |
367 KB |
| CTR |
Regional comparison for seven countries (DE, ES, FR, IT, UK, EE, PL) based on the aggregate for nine sectors (same configuration in each country) |
216 KB |
*Note: The questionnaires used in the two parts of the 2003 survey were largely the same. However, a few new questions were added in the second part in order to cover issues of special topical interest for policy. Therefore, although databases contain the data from both parts of the survey, some of the indicators are not available for specific countries in most of the sectors (those marked with an asterisk *).
Note on weighting schemes applied to data
Two weighting schemes have been applied: weighting by employment and by the number of enterprises. Data are presented in either way depending on the kind of the analysis to be made.
- Values that are reported as "weighted by employment" figures should be read as "enterprises comprising x% of employment in a sector/country/size-band". To give an example: The indicator "percentage of companies selling online" – if weighted by employment – is defined as "companies comprising x% of employees sell online". The reason for using employment weighting is that there are very many more micro-enterprises than non-micro enterprises. The unweighted figure would effectively represent mainly the smallest sizes of firm.
- Values that are reported as enterprise-weighted figures are to be read as "x% of enterprises", reflecting the number of enterprises as legal entities, but not their relative economic importance in terms of employment.
Weighting was based on the latest available universe figures by Eurostat. Missing or undisclosed universe data had to be imputed. The imputation procedures depended on auxiliary or proxy data availability, taking into account where available information about higher industry aggregations, nearest neighbour data, turnover-employment correlation and secondary sources other than Eurostat and allowing for the constraint of predetermined ranges such that imputed data had to be contingent with published sectoral, national and European universe totals as well as for final plausibility checks for every single imputed data item.
Background documents
The e-Business W@tch recommends that users of e-business statistics offered on this site should carefully read the short introduction to the methodology first (see table below). It provides information about the interview method, population coverage and sampling, the scope of the survey, about weighting schemes applied, about the field work organisations that conducted the interviews in the various countries and about difficulties encountered during the field work.
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