Statistics Norway has for nearly three decades given assistance to sister organizations in developing and transition countries. A common challenge for many of our partner countries has been to develop and maintain a technical platform for hosting a statistical version of their respective business registers. We have observed that there are few off the shelf products in this area and many offices end up with inadequate solutions.
Based on this, Statistics Norway has developed a generic statistical business register (STATBUS), a web-based application for statistical business registers. The system will be improved going forward.
The application is based on the international recommendations given in the UNECE guidelines for statistical business registers. The application is licensed as open source and is currently installed and tested in partner countries.
The new generation of Statbus is delivered with the option to choose between ISIC and NACE. The system allows adding custom activity categories as well as customizing the names to existing standard codes. Statbus comes with ISO2 country codes and names which we do not recommend changing. However, each country will need to provide their own regional hierarchy for drilling down into their business units. Other classifications such as sectors and legal forms may also vary from country to country.