Based on the yearly turnover tax statistics, the German turnover tax statis-
tics panel allows for the first time detailed longitudinal analyses of nearly all
economic sectors. In addition to turnover tax related variables, the dataset pro-
vides information about exports, imports and, due to the combination with the
German business register (Unternehmensregister), information about employ-
ees liable to pay social insurance. The panel contains more than 4.3 million
enterprises and 1.9 million of these are covered over the whole time period
from 2001 to 2005. There is no other German statistics that covers nearly all
economic sectors with such completeness.
In the following we give an overview of the turnover tax statistics and the
matching process (sections 2 and 3). Section 4 describes the variables included
in the dataset and in section 5 examples of the research potential are presented.
The paper closes with information about the way of data access