NACE Rev. 2 revision proposals

Responses to Eurostat calls for proposals and comments regarding the revision of the NACE Revision 2 classification of economic activities have been prepared for EFCA, the European Federation of Consultancy Associations.

The revision process started in May 2019 when the European Statistical System Committee endorsed:

• the review of NACE Revision 2 and the creation of a NACE Review Task Force;
• the importance of keeping the alignment between NACE and the international clasification ISIC by including the ISIC review and taking part in ISIC technical sub-group meetings;
• taking into account the new Framework Regulation Integrating Business Statistics (FRIBS);

Work started in late-2019 with a meeting of the European Commission's Directors of Methodology for official statistics (see report) who had received a report in July 2019 on the status and the work done for the revision of NACE. This work mainly involved the analysis of consultations with European Union Member States that had been carried out in 2018.

A preliminary road map (see report) indicated that a second round of consultations would be organised in March-June 2020 with the aim of finalising the structure of the new NACE by the end of 2020. There would also be a progress report in February 2020 to the European Statistical System Committee.

For this second round of consultatiions, Eurostat asked industry representatives, including EFCA, in mid-2019 to propose changes to NACE Rev. 2. A detailed report was sent to Eurostat and an online summary was submitted, see summary - PDF and report - PDF.

Eurostat responded in mid-2020 by asking for comments on short-listed revision proposals. Comments took the form of recommendations that were sent to EFCA Member Associations so that they could lobby their national statistics agency, see NACE 2 revision recommendations. These comments only concerned NACE Division M (Professional services) in spite of several other NACE Divisions being of importance for consulting engineering.

A detailed report that summarises the main documents is available on the FIDIC-EFCA Survey wiki.