Gross Value Added (GVA)

What GVA data does The Data City have? How should I use this data? What caveats are there?

The Data City estimates Gross Value Added (GVA) at company and RTIC level. This is available in ANALYSE and EXPLORE.

In EXPLORE, you will find GVA information in the financials tab of a company profile.

In ANALYSE, you will find GVA data in the analysis summary box.

GVA data in ANALYSE

How is GVA estimated?

We have produced an estimated GVA measure at the company level using official GVA and employment data.

1. The ONS produces GVA for 104 categories that can be matched to SIC codes. Similarly, the Business Register and Employment Survey (BRES) publishes sectoral employee data that can also be related to SIC codes. With this information, we have produced a measure of average GVA contribution per employee per SIC code.
2. The Data City have employee and SIC information for each company. This comes from Companies House and is different from BRES employment data. It is therefore possible to estimate a GVA value per company by multiplying the company's employee count (sourced from Data City) by the average GVA employee contribution associated with that same company's SIC.
3. A company can have multiple SIC codes. Where this is the case, we split employees equally across the SIC codes and multiply each share of employees by the GVA per employee for each SIC code. 

How to use this data?

When using GVA data for an RTIC or a list of companies, we strongly recommend reviewing the RTIC or list. You should check that the largest companies, by employee count, are appropriate for your analysis.

• Are they large multinationals that might have the majority of their employees abroad?
• For large companies, is this employee count in line with what you would expect for this company - is the employee count accurate?
• You may also want to consider whether large companies primarily operate in this sector, or whether their UK operations are not focused on this sector. You may want to remove companies that do not have significant UK operations, or if only a small part of their business falls within the selected sector or RTIC. 
  

Companies that have a large number of employees abroad make GVA analysis more complicated. These should be removed, or the final statistic caveated: "Estimated GVA is based on the number of employees and GVA per employee. Not all employees are necessarily located in the UK, and therefore this does not refer to the GVA occurring in the UK".

You might want to consider the impact that selecting the "exclude all ultimately foreign companies" filter has on the GVA value. Note: this will not remove UK based multinational firms that have large global employment, such as BP.