The Annual Enterprise Survey (AES)

Owned by Philip Stevens
Last updated: Aug 25, 2022
2 min read

The Annual Enterprise Survey (AES) is designed by StatsNZ to support the construction of the national accounts (e.g. GDP). Its name is a slight misnomer, as only some of the data reported in the AES dataset in the LBD come a survey (actually, many surveys). A lot of the information comes from tax data also available elsewhere in the LBD. Of the 500,000 firms in the AES population, only 15-20,000 actually complete the postal survey each year.

One of the complexities of the AES is the fact that it is sourced from a number of surveys. There are separate surveys for different industries, and a single firm may complete multiple surveys in a year if it has more than one kind-of-activity unit (KAU). You can find each of the surveys at Statistics New Zealand’s Store House.

Here are a few examples from 2019/10

Happily, many of the essential variables have been harmonised and documented, bringing together key data directly from the AES postal survey with data from IR10 returns for the purpose of productivity measurement. See Measuring Productivity for an introduction and Fabling and Mare (2019) for more detail.

Statistics New Zealand Page about the AES

More detailed information from SNZ on the AES in DataInfo+, including a data dictionary

SNZ publications and information releases from the AES

Other links

Early paper calculating labour productivity using the AES and the LEED