Business Signs of Life Series Two: Business Survival, 2020 to 2021

Series One of ‘Business Signs of Life’ reported on the interaction between employment-related payments and business activity in the period from March 2020 to January 2021. It examined the enterprise sectors which have been most impacted by the pandemic and its associated restrictions. This release, ‘Business Signs of Life- Series 2’ tracks the 2019 business population through the pandemic and splits enterprises into three categories: ‘Appears Closed’, ‘At Risk of Closing’ and ‘Still in Business’.

The results represent exploratory data matching and analysis by the CSO based on data from the following sources:

• The CSO's Central Business Register (CBR)
• Revenue’s real-time PAYE Modernisation data (PMOD)
• Pandemic Unemployment Payment (PUP) data
• Data from the Temporary Wage Subsidy Scheme (TWSS) and Employee Wage Subsidy Scheme (EWSS)
• VAT3 Data from Revenue.

Because this is an exploratory analysis, based on linking a number of new data sources, the results are published as a CSO Frontier Series output. The initial base population of enterprises in this bulletin refers to the 2019 Structural Business Statistics (SBS) population, which covers a total of 285,466 enterprises and includes NACE B-N (excluding K), R & S. However, the analysis of employment-related payments relates only to enterprises with at least one person engaged, also there is under-coverage of enterprises with less than 2 persons engaged on the VAT data set. Hence, enterprises with zero and one persons engaged were excluded from the analysis. As a result, 185,528 enterprises were excluded and all proportions in this release relate to a base population of 99.938 enterprises.

Annual business statistics are published about 18 months after the reference year. The reason for this time lag is that the figures on active enterprises depend on processed tax return data supplied to the Revenue Commissioners, which businesses have 11 months after the reference year to submit. Therefore, some intrinsic timing issues influence the base population. Since the enterprise population is based on the reference year 2019, some new enterprises commenced over the period 1 January 2019 to 21 December 2021. Due to these time-lag differences the usual demographic changes in the business population have not been measured in establishing a baseline for this report. The extent to which this has occurred cannot be accurately assessed until source data becomes available.

In this release a the ‘Signs of Life’ of an enterprise are categorised as follows:

‘Appears Closed’ - enterprises have either:

• Officially ceased according to the CSOs central business register
• Officially dissolved according to the Company Registrations Office (CRO)
• Have no employees remaining on the payroll, have no associated persons claiming state supports and have not made a VAT return between April 2020 and December 2021.

‘At Risk of Closing’ - enterprises that have

• no employees remaining on the payroll and either
1. have some associated persons claiming state supports, or
2. some limited VAT activity.

‘Still in Business’ - enterprises that still have employees on PMOD.

This release also includes data relating to officially ceased companies, this information comes from a combination of the CSO business register cessations and dissolutions data provided by the CRO.  Note that the number of cessations on the CSO Business Register does not equate to the Business Demography deaths. Business Demography deaths are based on activity (Employment, turnover, etc.) and for Business Demography purposes a company is deemed a death if there is no activity for 2 years. Despite this they may still have active revenue numbers, and not be ceased on the CBR.

Classifications

Sectoral

The sectors of economic activity included in the publication were determined in accordance with the NACE Rev.2 classification scheme, which is the European Commission’s classification system for economic activity. The NACE Rev.2 sectors included in the survey were as follows:

Sector B:          Mining and quarrying

Sector C:          Manufacturing

Sector D:          Electricity, gas, steam and air conditioning supply

Sector E:          Water supply; sewerage, waste management and remediation activities

Sector F:          Construction

Sector G:          Wholesale and retail trade; Repair of motor vehicles and motorcycles

Sector H:          Transportation and storage

Sector I:           Accommodation and food service activities

Sector J:           Information and communication

Sector L:           Real estate activities   

Sector M:          Professional, scientific and technical activities

Sector N:          Administrative and support service activities

Sector R:          Arts, entertainment and recreation

Sector S:          Other service activities