Business Purchasing Survey 

Purchasing

This survey constitutes a first part, the "purchasing part" of a more global survey, which should making it possible to improve and perpetuate GDP growth estimates, in a context of changes in business statistics.

This "purchasing" part of the survey will refresh the "intermediate input table" (IIT) at the heart of the compilation of the national accounts.

The IIT tracks intermediate consumption by branch and by product. It is now based on a dated structure, reproduced almost identically from year to year since the early 2000s. In order to have a new estimate of this IIT, the "purchasing component" of the survey will ask companies to detail their purchases by type of product.

This first part will be supplemented by a "production" part making it possible to improve, for certain enterprises, the breakdown by branch and by product of the production of the legal units of these enterprises.

The survey is new. It aims to gather useful information for the construction of the "intermediate input table", the IIT. This information is fundamental for GDP growth estimation calculations.

Indeed, the "demand" approach is based on the construction of the input-output table (IIT) which compares, product by product, all resources with all uses. Among uses, intermediate consumption by product is broken down in the "intermediate inputs table" by homogeneous branch of activity, taking into account the total intermediate consumption by branch from Esane (system for compiling annual enterprise statistics) and branch surveys. This breakdown, based on the structure of the IIT in year N-1, also results from the balancing of the resources-uses balances (ERE) produced by product. In this sense, it reconciles the "income" approach and the "demand" approach to GDP.

The IIT was re-estimated in 2000, for the years 1999 and 2000, from various sources (public or professional sources on customers of industrial goods, certain surveys on business services, survey on consumption of services by industry, public accounting data for non-market branches, etc.). This very heavy work made it possible to estimate with some precision about 65% of intermediate consumption. However, it has not been possible to continue this work since, and therefore the IIT structure currently in use in the current field is still based on this structure dating from the very early 2000s.

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