Structural business statistics: additional sectors, credit institutions and pension funds

Four amendments proposed by the European Parliament are accepted by the Council. The Council did not accept changing the optional characteristics on geographical breakdown into mandatory characteristics. Reactions suggest that the burden arising from the collection of the data is disproportionate to its use. The Council had the same views on "Number of pension schemes" and "Other debt securities and fixed income securities." The Council chose to keep the characteristics "Number of enterprises with members in other EEA countries" and "Geographical breakdown of number of members by gender" under the heading of pilot studies. They are not included in the list of mandatory variables. The Council states that the collection of the necessary data would result in considerable additional costs. The availability of data has not yet been tested by means of a voluntary data collection or with a pilot study. Furthermore, "Number of female members" cannot be included under the mandatory characteristics but will be included under the heading of pilot studies. The Council introduced modifications that were not in the initial proposal. - Four characteristics are to be collected for pensions funds. Three characteristics will be included under pilot studies. The fourth will be optional. -"Total investments broken down by currencies" is renamed "total investments broken down into euro and non-euro components." -The first reference year for the collection of data on pension funds will be changed from 2001 to 2002. -The additional transition period of three years for the environmental variables is changed to one year.�