The German Turnover Tax Statistics Panel

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