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Short Term Statistics, Business Statistics
Kari AJ Arildsen
+45 3917 3609

kjs@dst.dk

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Retail Trade Index

Many users who monitor the current business trends take an interest in the published statistics of retail trade. The demand for the statistics is broadly based in trade associations, the bank and finance sector, politicians, public and private institutions, researchers, enterprises, news media and Eurostat. The statistics provide input to the quarterly national accounts statistics and to Eurostat's pan-European statistics. The users view the retail trade index as an important short term indicator, and it often gets a lot of attention in the media and amongst other professional users.

User Needs

The retail trade statistics is of great interest to many enterprises within the retail trade sector, as publications allow them to compare their own sales development to the general trend of their trade industry.

Some users have a need for more commodity-based figures. The detailed industry figures are based solely on industry activity, thus enterprises with a broad commodity selection, in reality covering more industries, struggle with comparability. Since more commodity based statistics would greatly increase the workload on respondents, we are currently unable to meet this user need.

User Satisfaction

The users in general view the retail trade index as an important and easy to use short term indicator. The statistics are often cited in the media and widely used by other professional users. The detailed industry figures are used to monitor the development in the individual industries, but in some instances a more commodity-oriented approach has been requested, because some large enterprises in reality spread over several industries.

Data completeness rate

For some industries, no detailed index figures are published due to confidentiality or quality issues.

These statistics are subject to EU requirements. In terms of the completeness of data, all these requirements are fully met.