The sample contains 8 093 companies for an overall sampling frame of the scope of about 28 500 companies. The sampling frame contains companies belonging to the French "SIRENE" register, located in France (Metropolitan France and overseas departments), active on March 31st 2012, belonging to the non financial market sector, with 50 employees or more on December 31st 2008 and whose main activity corresponds to the sections from B to N (exception section K) from NACE Rév.2.
Then this sampling frame has been matched with the LIFI database (database containing financial links between companies) provided by INSEE in order to collect in particular some information about the type of company (not belonging to a group, subsidiary or a group, head of a group) and the ownership of subsidiaries located in France or abroad.
The sampling frame is stratified by the activity of the company (71 categories) and the workforce (3 categories: from 50 to 99 employees, from 100 to 249 employees, 250 employees or more): this brings 213 strata in the sampling frame.
The 4 964 legal units of 250 employees or more taken from the sampling frame are exhaustively surveyed.
Concerning non-exhaustive strata, an allocation proportional to the workforce has been calculated and then slightly modified in order to improve (or to re-balance in some cases) the precision on the more expected fields of dissemination.
In each stratum, the drawing of the sample has been carried out with the "systematic drawing" method applied on the database sorted by " fine type " of company for each stratum.
