Trade by Exporter Characteristics – Goods

The Trade by Exporter Characteristics - Goods program provides aggregate statistical information and analysis on characteristics of Canadian businesses who export goods to countries outside of Canada. At the enterprise level, such characteristics include value of exports and the number of exporting enterprises by employment size, number of partner countries, country of destination, concentration of exports, size of exports, and industry according to the North American Industry Classification System (NAICS). Supplementary information at the establishment level includes data by industry according to the NAICS of the exporting establishment, available by province and territories.

Trade by Exporter Characteristics data are produced by first identifying exporters, the declaring unit, from customs or other administrative information. The information contained in the export records can then be linked to the information available for the statistical unit (enterprise or establishment) in the Business Register, namely business characteristics such as industry of the exporting enterprise or establishment (according to the NAICS). In addition, linkage to the Survey of Employment, Payrolls and Hours (SEPH) provides information on enterprise employment.

Together this collection of information provides a profile of Canadian businesses engaged in exports of goods. The resulting database contains the original exporter information (such as the goods they trade, value of exports, and country of destination) along with business characteristics about the exporter. Analysis pertaining to the size, number of, and dominance of exporters can then be produced.

Data are extracted from administrative files and derived from other Statistics Canada surveys and/or other sources. Canadian exports to the United States are compiled using United States import statistics (from the U.S. Census Bureau) in accordance with the 1987 Memorandum of Understanding between Canada and the United States. This procedure is used for all Canadian exports to the United States except exports of natural gas and electricity. These two commodities are recorded directly from Canadian sources in both Canadian and U.S. customs data.

Data for Canadian exports to countries other than United States are compiled by Statistics Canada from B13A forms received via the Canada Border Services Agency (CBSA) and from Summary Reports and Canadian Automated Export Declarations (CAED) submitted directly to Statistics Canada.

The Generic Statistical Universe File (GSUF), which is the term for an individual vintage of the Business Register (BR, record number 1105), is an integral data source, as exporters (referred to as declaring units) are linked to enterprises and establishments from this universe in order to produce the TEC dataset. A list of operating entity numbers along with other business characteristic variables formed the reference year GSUF extraction.

The number of employees used in the TEC - Goods dataset primarily comes from the Survey of Employment, Payroll and Hours (SEPH, record number 2612). When employment information is unavailable from SEPH employment is obtained from the PD7 source which is available on the Business Register. If PD7 employment is 0 for an individual enterprise, that enterprise is counted as having 0 employees. If employment for an individual enterprise is unavailable in PD7, profiled number of employees on the BR is used. If employment is not found for an individual enterprise from any of the three sources, the enterprise is classified in the 0 or unreported employees category by default.