French classification of activities, Rev 2 (NAF 2008 rev 2).

Industry, construction, trade and services, i.e. sections B to S (except section O) of the NACE classification.

Enterprise birth corresponds to the creation of a new combination of production factors with the restriction that no other enterprise is involved in the event. Enterprise births are indeed legal units creations (see Definition of Enterprise birth).

The creation of an establishment is defined consistently with the creation of an enterprise, and corresponds to the implementation of new means of production (see definition of the creations of establishments).

Economically active" legal units are those which carried out real economic activity during
the year in question. This "economically active" character is determined on the basis of the following criteria, known from administrative sources: positive sales figures, number of employees during the year, or, failing this, tax returns relating to the year in question. Business activity is therefore recorded for the year as a whole, and not at a specific date, such as December 31, as was the case for the REE.

As an exception, legal units under the micro-entrepreneur regime are considered "economically active" during the year if they have declared strictly positive sales during
the year. To be consistent with the activity criteria applied to other companies, only sales achieved during the year are taken into account, even if the company is created during the year. This may result in discrepancies with statistics on self-employed persons at
the end of the year from the non-Salaried Employees database.

Economically active" establishments are those which have employed people during the year, or which are the headquarters of an "economically active" legal unit.

The main statistical units used by SIDE are legal units and local units.

The scope covered by SIDE is made up of legal units that are :

• productive, i.e. producing goods or services ;

• and belong to the market sector, or that sell goods or services at an economically significant price. Units whose operations are not mainly financed by a market activity (administrations, local authorities, social organizations, non-market associations, etc.) are therefore excluded.

The sectoral scope includes industry, construction, trade and services. Agriculture, forestry and fisheries are therefore not covered by business demography statistics on legal units and local units.

The local units covered by the SIDE system are those within the sectoral scope of business demography and belonging to market producer legal units.

Some local units may therefore belong to the business demography scope, whereas the legal unit does not. Conversely, some legal units may include local units that do not fall within the sectors covered by business demography. This is particularly true of related sectors such as agriculture, forestry and the food industry.

Data on births of enterprises and establishments are available from 2012 onwards. Stocks of "economically active" legal units and establishments have been produced using the SIDE system from 2014 onwards.