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This is the fourth year of the consolidated annual report on Business in Ireland. The purpose of this report is to provide an overview of the Structural Business Statistics currently produced by the Central Statistics Office (CSO).
The report this year focuses once more on the activities and performance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). Chapter 3 is dedicated to the analysis of SMEs and includes a categorisation of SMEs into Irish-owned or foreign owned enterprises, who were either engaged or not in international trade. Chapter 5 looks more specifically at the performance of SMEs compared to large enterprises while Chapter 6 looks at the breakdown of the business costs faced by SMEs, including personnel costs and its constituent parts of wages & salaries and employers’ social security costs. Total purchases of goods and services by enterprises are also analysed in this chapter in terms of broad sector and size class.
Chapter 7 offers a breakdown of the broad economy sectors into more detailed business sectors and includes an overview of these detailed sectors, while Chapter 8 concentrates on the activities of the affiliates of Irish multinationals abroad and the contribution made by the affiliates of foreign multinationals in Ireland.
The financial sector, which is traditionally excluded from the Structural Business Statistics, is analysed in Chapter 9. The coverage of the business economy in Ireland in this book is completed with this chapter.
The final chapter offers an overview of international comparisons of the key characteristics of the business economy, focusing on the member states of the European Union.
Appreciation is extended to all firms that co-operate with the structural business surveys carried out by the CSO. The information they provide is treated as strictly confidential. Direct or indirect disclosure of information relating to individual respondents is avoided in the publication of results by combining categories containing small numbers of enterprises.
Irish data presented in this report are available on StatBank, the main data dissemination service on the CSO website. See Appendix 4. The data presented in this report are only a small fraction of the Structural Business
Statistics available online.
The international comparisons data in Chapters 6 and 10 are sourced from the Eurostat website.
Learn about our data and confidentiality safeguards, and the steps we take to produce statistics that can be trusted by all.