The goal of the agencies charged with creating and maintaining the source lists should always be to include accurate data on all business units, large and small, new and old. There are, according to the Census Bureau, roughly 18 million nonemployer firms—individual proprietorships, partnerships, or corporations with no paid employees—that account for about three quarters of all firms and a reasonably large fraction (12 percent in 2000) of aggregate U.S. business revenues. Thus, sharing of business data would be quite limited if it did not permit an integration of data on the full range of businesses operating in the economy.

We believe that a compelling data-driven case has been made, in this report and elsewhere, that reconciliation of the business lists would better serve downstream users—such as BEA in the production of national accounts, the Federal Reserve in carrying out research to inform monetary policy, and the Congressional Budget Office in projecting real gross domestic product growth—to an extent that more than warrants the actions recommended here. The political and legal feasibility of expanding data sharing among the statistical agencies has been enhanced by CIPSEA; indeed, given the uniform set of requirements enacted through CIPSEA, the agencies are now in a better position than ever before to protect data collected for statistical purposes under a pledge of confidentiality.

The statistical agencies rightly view themselves primarily as data producers, and their mission is to do so, maximizing quality subject to budget constraints. While the agencies do maintain skilled in-house staffs, the vast share of research expertise resides elsewhere, at universities or other nongovernmental institutions. It is the intensive use of statistical agency prod-