Section 15
Business Enterprise
This section relates to the place and
behavior of the business firm and to busi-
ness initiative in the American economy.
It includes data on the number, type, and
size of businesses; financial data of
domestic and multinational U.S. corpora-
tions; business investments, expendi-
tures, and profits; and sales and invento-
ries.
The principal sources of these data are
the Survey of Current Business, published
by the Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA),
the Federal Reserve Bulletin, issued by the
Board of Governors of the Federal Reserve
System, the annual Statistics of Income
(SOI) reports of the Internal Revenue Serv-
ice (IRS), and the Census Bureau’s Eco-
nomic Census, County Business Patterns,
Quarterly Financial Report for Manufac-
turing, Mining, and Trade Corporations
(QFR), Surveys of Minority- and Women-
Owned Business Enterprises, and Annual
Capital Expenditures Survey.
Business firms—A firm is generally
defined as a business organization under
a single management and may include
one or more establishments. The terms
firm, business, company, and enterprise
are used interchangeably throughout this
section. A firm doing business in more
than one industry is classified by industry
according to the major activity of the firm
as a whole.
The IRS concept of a business firm relates
primarily to the legal entity used for tax
reporting purposes. A sole proprietorship
is an unincorporated business owned by
one person and may include large enter-
prises with many employees and hired
managers and part-time operators. A part-
nership is an unincorporated business
owned by two or more persons, each of
whom has a financial interest in the busi-
ness. A corporation is a business that is
legally incorporated under state laws.
While many corporations file consolidated
tax returns, most corporate tax returns
represent individual corporations, some
of which are affiliated through common
ownership or control with other corpora-
tions filing separate returns.
Economic census—The economic cen-
sus