Global business register used to estimate cross-border internet purchases within the EU

We used ORBIS as business register. It is a global corporate database maintained by Bureau van Dijk (http://bvdinfo.com/orbis) and contains detailed corporate information on over 200 million private companies world wide. The database has been claimed to ‘suffer from some structural biases’ (Ribeiro et al., 2010). However, regarding European companies with an annual turnover of more than € 100000, the data set is practically complete (Garcia‐Bernardo and Takes, 2018). Data from business registers regarding smaller foreign companies are not needed in our analysis, as these companies do not have to file tax returns in the Netherlands. The ORBIS database is used, because it contains the principal and secondary NACE (revision 2) codes for companies that are established in the EU. The NACE code can be used to select all active (and inactive) companies that are established in the EU and that are principally or secondarily economically active in retail trade. The result is a data set of 6996468 companies, from which companies established in the Netherlands have been excluded. This data set, including each company's country of establishment, was extracted from ORBIS on June 24th, 2017.The data has been used in the following publication:https://doi.org/10.1111/rssa.12487