UK Economic Agents

For the purposes of national statistics, UK economic agents may either belong to the public sector (central government, local government and public corporations) or the private sector (households and companies). The private corporate sector is further subdivided into non-financial companies (PNFCs) and financial corporations.

In turn, financial corporations consist of monetary financial institutions (the Issue and Banking Departments of the Bank of England plus banks and building societies) and other financial corporations (including, for instance, insurance companies, pension funds, leasing companies, securities dealers, companies involved in factoring and credit card issuers etc).

Much of the following analysis (sections 15.3 Internal Finance, 15.3 Building the business, 15.5 External Finance, 15.6 Mergers and Acquisitions) is based on statistics for just one of these areas, private non-financial companies, in other words those independent bodies whose main activity is the provision of goods and/or non-financial services.

PNFCs include partnerships but not sole proprietors because of the difficulty of disentangling sole proprietor financial information from household information. Section 15.2 (The Business Stock) analyses the stock of businesses on the basis of statistics published by the Department of Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform (DBERR) and does include sole proprietors.