Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Financial Performance Indicators

Question

Financial Performance Indicators is described as containing up-to-date, reliable and comprehensive data on Canadian businesses. I am having trouble accepting that the sample is truly comprehensive. Does it really include every company in a given sector, or is the sample size just really big?

Answer

It is a Census of all incorporated businesses in Canada. Certain industries are not covered, such as NAICS 55 and all the public institutions under code 9. Additional industries may not be covered as well. Of course, the division only publishes for those industries for which suppression is not an issue.

The methodology is not very clear-cut - I think it has to do with "trade secrets". But they do use the median values to create the quartiles and then calculate averages for the quartile if it does not fall directly on a median point to calculate the value for the quartile.

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