Attributes
The firm characteristics (or attributes) included in the PAT are the size, industry, and age of firms; and the value of their exports. Firm characteristics can influence government policy decision making. For example, large firms can be more influential than small firms in shaping policy features or firms concentrated in certain industries can have more influence than less concentrated industries. Therefore, having a good understanding of firm characteristics helps policy makers to evaluate and monitor existing programs and design future policies.
- The size of firms are categorised as small (more than 0, but less than 20 employees), medium (20 or more employees, but less than 200 employees) or large (200 or more employees). Non-employing firms are not considered in PAT.
- Industry is classified according to the Australian and New Zealand Standard Industrial Classification (ANZSIC) divisions.
- Age is measured from registration for an ABN or GST (in years)
- Exporters indicates the percentage of firms exporting at any value. Export class is then divided into $1 to $2,000; $2,001 to $10,000; $10,001 to $100,000; and $100,001 plus by dollar value of export sales.
See the Data dictionary for additional details on attributes and other terms used in the PAT.
How the data is organised
For each program included in the PAT, participant firms are grouped according to the financial year they joined the program (their cohort). This allows us to look at the attributes of a snapshot of new firms each year, rather than looking at all the firms at once from across the life of the program.
The all-firm benchmark
The attributes of the firms in each cohort are compared to an economy-wide benchmark (the “all-firm benchmark”). The benchmark includes all active, employing firms in the Australian economy in the cohort year. There are about 800,000 of these firms in a given year. It is important to note that because all the active, employing firms have been used in the benchmark it is not a true counterfactual for the program participant firms. A counterfactual is an approximation of what would have happened to the program participant firms, had they not been in the program. For deeper analysis, where the benchmark would serve as a counterfactual, the benchmark would be made up of firms similar to the program participants, based on various observable firm characteristics. Differences in attributes between program participant firms and the all-firm benchmark, as it is currently constructed, can therefore not necessarily be caused by participation in the program.
Business Longitudinal Analysis Data Environment
The PAT draws data from the Business Longitudinal Analysis Data Environment (BLADE). BLADE is a data environment that combines ABS survey data with the department’s program administrative data, as well as administrative data from other organisations such as the Australian Tax Office (ATO).
BLADE data is available from 2001–02, when the GST was introduced. As administrative data in BLADE is not originally collected for statistical analysis, there are inherent time lags and potential reporting errors while the data is collected, cleaned and integrated to other data sources. More information on BLADE can be found here.