The German Turnover Tax Statistics Panel

Based on the yearly turnover tax statistics, the German turnover tax statistics panel allows for the first time detailed longitudinal analyses of nearly all economic sectors. In addition to turnover tax related variables, the dataset provides information about exports, imports and, due to the combination with the German business register (Unternehmensregister), information about employees liable to pay social insurance. The panel contains more than 4.3 million enterprises and 1.9 million of these are covered over the whole time period from 2001 to 2005. There is no other German statistics that covers nearly all economic sectors with such completeness. In the following we give an overview of the turnover tax statistics and the matching process (sections 2 and 3). Section 4 describes the variables included in the dataset and in section 5 examples of the research potential are presented. The paper closes with information about the way of data access (section 6).