INNOVATION SURVEY RESULTS
Statistical Bulletin
RĪGA, 2003
ANNEX
Quality Report on the Survey of Innovative Activities
Sampling frame
For the formation of the sample the Business Register of the Central Statistical
Bureau of the Republic of Latvia was used. The Business Register holds information
on all those enterprises and organisations in Latvia that are economically active
regardless whether they operate within the private or public sector. The register
information contains a unique identification code, the name of the enterprise, its main
kind of economic activity (last year and during the last reporting period), net turnover
in the last two years, common statutory capital, the code of activity status, etc. The
Register is continuously updated. For the building of the sample the code of activity
status is of great importance since it allows selecting only the economically active
enterprises, which represent less than 50% of all registered enterprises.
The Enterprise Register of the Republic of Latvia and the State Revenue
Service are the main source of information for the CSB Business Register. The
statistical Business Register is also updated by means of a special register survey as
well as by drawing information from various CSB enterprise surveys. All newly
created enterprises are surveyed after a period of six months since the day of their
registration.
Sample design
The sample of the Latvian innovation survey was created as a stratified
simple random sample. All enterprises that employed not less than 10 persons were
divided into 10 strata (typological groups) on the basis of three indicators
characterising the enterprise: the NACE group (the code describing the main line of
economic activity of enterprise), the size group of enterprise and the location
(registration) of the enterprise (in Riga or the rest of Latvia). According to the
methodological recommendations CIS3, the survey covered all those enterprises in
Latvia that employed at least 10 employees and whose main activity was
characterised by codes 10 - 41, 51, 60 - 67, 72 - 73, 742 or 743. The total number of
such enterprises is comparatively small (only 4398 enterprises) and in total 278 strata
were formed. Strata were formed according to the description given in the Eurostat
document CIS3: 39 NACE groups were established as well as 5 size groups
depending on the number of employees (10 - 19; 20 - 49; 50 - 99; 100 - 249; 250 and
more) and 2 territorial groups.
Information on the number of enterprises within the population broken down
by NACE groups and size groups are given in Table 1 and Table 2, respectively).
Table 1. Sampled enterprises by economic activity, 1999-2001
NACE
10 - 14
15 - 16
17 - 19
20 - 22
23 - 26
27 - 28
29 - 33
34 - 35
36 - 37
40 - 41
51
60 - 63
64
65 - 66
67
72
73
742
743
Total
Number of
enterprises
27
285
188
412
121
102
115
43
110
82
411
334
31
61
15
51
34
49
20
2491
%
1,08
11,44
7,55
16,54
4,86
4,09
4,62
1,73
4,42
3,29
16,50
13,41
1,24
2,45
0,60
2,05
1,36
1,97
0,80
100
Table 2. Enterprises by size group at the moment of sample formation
Number of
employees
10 - 19
20 - 49
50 - 99
100 - 249
≥250
Total
Number of enterprises
total
in the sample
2039
733
1398
797
505
505
299
299
157
157
4398
2491
Responded
Did not respond
570
731
469
296
157
2223
163
66
36
3
0
268
Sampling
fraction (%)
36
57
100
100
100
57
2
Estimation procedures
For the estimation of the population and domain totals the Horvitz-Thompson
estimators were used. The weighting coefficients were calculated as a ratio between
the total number of enterprises and the number of responding enterprises in each
stratum. The sample of the 3rd, 4th and 5th size group included all enterprises, however,
not all enterprises responded. Thus in some strata within the 3rd and 4th size groups the
weighting coefficients of the enterprises exceed 1.
Sampling errors of estimates
Variance and the coefficient of variation of an estimate were calculated
following the Horvitz-Thompson formulas using SPSS (version 8.02) and SUDAAN
(version 7.5.2) software. The Taylor linearisation option was used for the SUDAAN
software. The estimated coefficient of variation of the Boolean variable, which shows
the presence of an innovative activity in the enterprise, is 3,41%. The estimated
coefficient of variation of the amount of resources invested in innovation, is 2,84%.
Frame imperfections
Overcoverage
Of the 2491 sampled enterprises, 2290 enterprises submitted returns although
after data collection it turned out that in 67 enterprises the number of employees was
lower than 10 so they should not have participated in the survey. The number of the
actually valid questionnaires was 2223. For this reason the overcoverage is 2,9%.
Classification errors
True misclassification occurred in 10 enterprises where some stratification
characteristics were not determined correctly: for 7 enterprises classification errors
were made both concerning the territory and the NACE code group, for 2 enterprises
– only the territory and for 1 enterprise – only NACE code group. True
misclassification in this survey is therefore 0,45%.
Pseudo-misclassification arises with variables of high variability, as the size
group of employment. The larger the number of group, the greater the difficulty to
maintain the register up-to-date and the higher the probability of pseudomisclassification occurring to this variable. There are 188 cases (8,5%) of such
enterprises.
Undercoverage
Undercoverage implies a situation when for some reasons a part of the
surveyed enterprises is not included in the sample frame. All economically active
enterprises that employed not less than 10 persons were included in the sample frame.
Two main reasons explaining undercoverage may be identified. Firstly, an
economically active enterprise in the business register may be misclassified as
economically inactive thus as a consequence it is not included in the sample frame.
Secondly, the number of employees of an economically active enterprise may be
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indicated as lower than 10 while the actual number of employees in this enterprise is
higher than 10.
The size of undercoverage related to the first reason was estimated during the
register survey that was conducted by the CSB of Latvia. This survey shows that
among the enterprises that in the business register are classed as economically
inactive, less than 7% are in reality economically active. It should be emphasised that
in the majority of cases the number of employees in enterprises that are erroneously
classified as inactive ranges from 0 to 5. It is only very rarely that the number of
employees in such enterprises was higher than 10 therefore the influence on the
survey of undercoverage associated with the first reason should be ignored.
It is comparatively difficult to estimate the undercoverage in relation to the
above-mentioned second reason.
Non-response
Table 3. Response rate
NACE
10 - 14
15 - 37
50 - 52
60 - 64
65 - 67
70 - 74
Total
10 - 49
90,00
85,49
85,42
86,44
71,79
81,42
85,03
Number of employees
50 - 249
≥250
100,00
100,00
95,55
100,00
96,61
100,00
97,09
100,00
82,61
100,00
77,50
100,00
94,68
100,00
During the data collection stage no efforts were spared to attain a high
response rate. Special attention was paid to the acquisition of data from the large
(with more than 250 employees) and medium-sized (50 - 249 employees) enterprises.
The total response rate was 82,9%. The response rate for the large enterprises was
100%, for the medium-sized it was 94,68% and for the small enterprises (10 - 49
employees) – 85,03%.
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