Producing historical time series for STS-statistics in NACE Rev.2

This contribution discusses possible scenarios and methodologies for the national statistical agencies for backcasting the new classification scheme (NACE Rev. 2.0) in existing time series of business statistics. We provide a discussion of the basic principles of reconstructing time series in general, after which the application of these methods in the area of short term business statistics is handled and illustrated with an example. We conclude that it is possible to obtain reasonable approximations of historic time series using rather simple methodology, but the quality of the backcasted time series is hampered by heterogeneity of classes.