From a Legal Definition to an Economic Definition of an Enterprise: Method and Usage Guide

In statistics, the notion of enterprise has often been associated with its purely legal definition, i.e. the legal unit registered in the INSEE SIRENE register. This approach has the advantage of providing a wealth of administrative data, the majority of which is collected at this level, thereby reducing the survey burden on enterprises. However, with the emergence of corporate groups in particular, legal units owned by others are liable to lose all or part of their autonomy and, therefore, are not enterprises in an economic sense. This is why INSEE now bases its structural statistics on enterprises in the economic sense, in order to have a more relevant view of the performance of the economic fabric.