Economic Censuses include:
Special programs also cover enterprise statistics and minority-owned and women-owned businesses. A Census of Agriculture and Census of Governments are taken separately. Information is collected using mail questionnaires and data from the administrative records of other government agencies.
ARCHIVAL/ACCESS:
A multitude of ASCII files describing a variety of topics, such as: purpose and uses of economic censuses, availability of the data, historical information, availability of more frequent economic data, sources for more information, census disclosure rules, dollar values, reliability of data, special tabulations, and comparability of the 1982 and 1987 censuses.
The CD-ROM release contains over 300 data files. Included are data dictionaries, label files, catalog files, and help screen files. A public-domain program is included and can be used to selectively display data from the files to the computer screen, print them out, or extract data to a file.
The universe for each data source differs slightly. Both employers with and without payroll may be included. The universe also differs based on data type: administrative records or mail surveys.
Data are taken from either census questionnaires or administrative reports of other Federal agencies and are not subject to sampling errors. Nonsampling errors can be attributed to many sources: inability to identify all cases in the universe; definition and classification problems; difficulties in interpreting the questions; errors in recording and coding the data; other errors in collection, response, coverage and estimation for missing or misreported data. Accuracy of tabulated data is determined by the combined effects of various nonsampling errors.
No direct measurement of these effects has been obtained except for estimation for missing or misreported data; however, precautionary steps were taken in all phases of the collection, processing and tabulation of the data to minimize the effects of nonsampling errors.
The Economic Censuses cover most but not all sectors of the economy. They apply only to establishments with a payroll so will not include nonemployers. Some establishments include more than one kind of activity and thus will not fit neatly into one SIC category. Since establishments are only counted in one area, total activity may not be reported for all areas.
The census of manufactures provides counts of establishments by industry by employment-size class. Industry classifications are based on considerations such as similarity of manufacturing processes, types of materials used, types of customers, and the like. The resulting group of establishments must significantly differ in terms of number, value added by manufacture, value of shipments, and number of employees. For 1987, there are 20 major groups (two-digit SIC), 139 industry groups (three-digit SIC), and 459 industries (four-digit SIC).
The censuses of retail trade and service industries provide establishment counts by sales-size as well as employment-size for detailed kinds of business:
The census of agriculture reports counts of farms classified by size in several ways: land area, market value of products sold, cattle inventory, hogs inventory, and cropland of three types.
The ZIP Code tabulation covers all farms, regardless of size, in all 50 States. It presents total farm counts by five-digit ZIP Code, and farm counts by ZIP Code by frequency for the following items: