Ownership patterns and enterprise groups in German structural business statistics

First official data on enterprise groups and foreign majority ownership for Germany became available recently. The new firm‐level information is linked to core German structural business statistics, the URS, and therefore offers a wide variety of new research possibilities in fields that often fall victim to polarizing public and academic debate of high relevance to policy decisions. German official statistics generally offer a high quality level, but, since private vendor data integration and processing of data on capital links remain in development, new features of representativeness must prove themselves in the future.