Methodological Notes - Selected Indicators

The basis of organizational statistics data is the Business Register administrated by the Statistical Office of the Slovak Republic (SOSR) according to Act No 540/2001 on the state statistics. Published data relates to active legal units only.

Legal units include:

• legal persons whose existence is recognized by law independently of the individuals or institutions which may own them or are members of them,
• natural persons who are engaged in an economic activity in their own right.

The legal unit always forms, either by itself or sometimes in combination with other legal units, the legal basis for the statistical unit known as the enterprise.

Enterprise is the smallest combination of legal units that is an organisational unit producing goods or services, which benefits from a certain degree of autonomy in decision-making, especially for the allocation of its current resources. An enterprise carries out one or more activities at one or more locations. An enterprise may be a sole legal unit.

Institutional unit is an elementary economic decision-making centre characterized by uniformity of behaviour and decision-making autonomy in the exercise of its principal function. A unit is regarded as constituting an institutional unit if it has decision-making autonomy in respect of its principal function and keeps a complete set of accounts.

Institutional units are integrated into cohorts which are called sectors, whereas some of them are then divided into the sub sectors. Each sector or sub sector includes institutional units with a similar type of economical behaviour. Institutional units - market producers - are integrated into the following sectors: non-financial corporations, financial corporations or households.

Sector of non-financial corporations includes market producing institutional units with the main activity of producing products and non-financial services.

Sector of financial corporations includes institutional unit mostly interested in financial intermediation and/or financial auxiliary activities (financial auxiliary institutions).

Sector of households includes individuals as market producers of goods or non-financial or financial services and individuals as private producers for own final use.

Sector of general government covers institutional units, which are other non-market producers. Their production is intended for individual and collective use and it is mainly financed through the obligatory payments or through institutional units dealing with redistribution of national product.

Sector of non-profit institutions serving households includes non-profit units and other private non-market producers that are created for the purpose of producing goods and services whose status does not permit them to be a source of income, profit, or other financial gains for the units that establish, control, or finance them. Their principal resources, apart from those derived from occasional sales, are derived from voluntary contributions in cash or in kind from households in their capacity as consumers, from payments made by general governments, and from property income.

The data source is the Business Register of the Statistical Office of the Slovak Republic.