Building an integrated database for the trade sector for the period 2010- 2022

Abstract

This paper aims at describing the process of combining and merging data from the retail trade survey with data stemming from the survey on business confidence in retail trade, for the period from 2010 to 2022. While our previous paper focused on macro data, this paper explores the comparability of micro data. Although the samples of the two surveys involved in the study have a different sectoral coverage, combining them interestingly allows checking the consistency between the evaluations expressed by the economic operators in the qualitative survey and the indicators of the quantitative survey. The merged dataset is a valuable resource to study the enterprises’ expectations in the retail trade sector as it includes precious information such as retail trade index, economic activity, channel of distribution and size of the enterprises and enterprises’ judgements and expectations on sales for the main economic and business variables.
The paper is organised as follows: a general overview of data sources and a description of the key steps for combining the databases of the two mentioned surveys. The following part describes more in detail all actions implemented to build the integrated dataset and analyses the units involved in both samples through descriptive statistics, graphs and statistical tests. Comparing the two samples highlighted that the number of units involved in both surveys has increased over the years and that there is a good correspondence between qualitative data and quantitative data.