Business Structure Survey — Algeria (2011)

Employment, turnover and value added of Algerian firms, branch by branch. 1,588 observations across 140 codes of the Algerian Activity Nomenclature, at section and division level, split between public and private sector.

This is the only measure of employment by branch in our whole catalogue. Our employment products cross status — employees, self-employed, family workers — and our wage products cross qualification. None says how many people work in extractive industry, construction, or information and communication. This one does, in permanent and non-permanent headcount.

Three families of quantities, each split by activity, legal sector and nomenclature level:

• headcount, permanent, non-permanent and total;
• turnover, public, private and combined;
• gross output, intermediate consumption and value added, in millions of dinars.

Each family carries its identity, and it is exact. Gross output less intermediate consumption equals value added; permanent plus non-permanent equals total; public plus private turnover equals the whole. These are accounting definitions, not approximations, and they must come out right. The delivered file satisfies 529 out of 529.

Columns are named by position, and that is justified here. Their headers leave the PDF as mush — "Effectif Effectif non Effectif total" on one line. But each family's identity already validated the order at extraction: the third column equals the sum or difference of the first two, and no permutation satisfies that by chance. Naming by position after verifying the arithmetic is not guessing.

What the layout demanded. A total sometimes sticks to the label — "B-Industries extractives 159 728*", footnote marker included — and the row came out with two values instead of three, discarded as too short, taking the whole table's verification with it. A section label wraps over two lines, the figures sitting on the second, sometimes with no label at all. And a table's context — the legal sector — is not above its title but below it: a first reading left thirty-nine tables with no sector, enough to conflate public and private under one key.

Codes receive their official label where the Algerian Activity Nomenclature knows them, as in our business registers — and it is by that code that the two products join.

What we do not publish. Four tables whose row sums do not recover the published total, and thirty-six rows with no nomenclature code.

Scope. One year, 2011: that is the survey's vintage, and the office has not repeated it in this form. The substantive check holds: extractive industry accounts for 4,527,952 of the 5,441,028 million in industrial value added, and the four sections sum exactly to the published total.