Ownership Patterns and Enterprise Groups in German Structural Business Statistics

Division of labor, cross‐border capital flows, and capital linkages among business entities have intensified at national as well as global levels, and have led to significant changes in the structure of business. For example, firms outsource ancillary activities to independent legal entities, and multinational enterprises (MNEs) shift production abroad to lower costs. Structural business statistics should therefore offer a sufficient consideration of these changes to provide the possibility of an adequate economic analysis. Until recently, official German firm‐level data neither allowed the identification of enterprise groups nor revealed the existence of foreign ownership or type and origin of the latter. This lack of information severely restricted analyses of structural business statistics, such as those concerning the concentration of market power and patterns of foreign influence on business activities within the German economy.