The survey covered three areas, namely: foreign ownership, franchising agreements and collaborative agreements.

In terms of foreign ownership, the study found that regardless of the employment size group, the majority of businesses reported being Wholly Australian owned. Proportions ranged from 72% for businesses with 200 or more persons employed to 98% for businesses with 0-4 persons employed.

The Mining industry recorded the highest proportion of businesses with Greater than 50% foreign ownership, followed by Wholesale Trade at 9%.

Innovation-active businesses were almost twice as likely as non innovation-active businesses to have some degree of foreign ownership. For example, in the Information Media and Telecommunications industry, 12% of innovation-active businesses had some percentage of foreign ownership compared to 6% for non innovation-active businesses.
and/or provision of multiple responses, refer to Explanatory Notes 17-19.

With regard to franchising agreements, 5% of businesses surveyed responded as having involvement in a franchising agreement.

Businesses with 20-199 persons employed were the most likely to be a Franchisee (10%). The proportion of businesses operating as a Franchisor was highest for businesses with 200 or more persons employed (4%), compared to rates around 1% for businesses within the other employment size ranges.

The industries with the highest proportion of Franchisees were Rental, Hiring and Real Estate Services along with Retail Trade, both of which were the only industries to record proportions above 10%.

The proportion of businesses reporting any type of collaborative arrangement increased with each successive employment size range. Joint marketing or distribution was the most prevalent, with 5% of all businesses indicating this type of arrangement.

At the industry level, the highest proportion of businesses with any collaborative arrangements was Mining at 19%. By contrast, the Construction industry reported the lowest proportion of businesses involved in any collaborative arrangements at 4%. More than half of all industries reported rates of involvement in collaborative arrangements of 10% or more.

Innovation-active businesses, at 16%, were more than twice as likely to be involved in some type of collaborative arrangements than non innovation-active businesses (6%).

The Australian Bureau of Statistics has recently released its third series of Business Characteristics Survey (BCS).

The BCS is an annual survey on the following topics: business structure, business performance, business use of information technology, business innovation, business finance, business markets and competition, and barriers to business activities or performance.

The ABS uses an economic statistics units model to describe the characteristics of businesses, and the structural relationships between related businesses.

The sample design for this survey covers collection of data based on a random sample of approximately 9,700 businesses using a mail out questionnaire. The sample was stratified by industry and an employment based size indicator.

According to ABS, all businesses on the ABS Business Register identified as having 200 or more employees were included in the sample. The reference period for most of the business characteristics items included in the 2006-07 BCS is the year ended 30 June 2007 with financial data relating to the most recent financial year ended on or before 30 September 2007.

We will present in the following series of pages of 8 parts summary information of the BCS.

The series are Business Structure and Arrangements, Business Markets and Competition, Business Finance, Business Use of Information Technology, Business Innovation and Barriers to Business Activities or Performance.

But unlike the McAfee experiment, I will not be using a clean laptop without spam protection. What I will do instead is to monitor the spam emails that I would receive in my new email address, and will report the results. I will keep logs of my usage of my new email address as well as details of site and their promotion offers.

Whether or not the spam emails I will receive have been correctly identified by my email service provider as spams will also indicate the effectiveness of my email service provider in filtering out spam emails and the sites who are parties to spam as well as their spam-related activities.

The McAfee’s S.P.A.M (acronym for Spammed Persistently All Month) will run for the whole month of April with participants from around the world - ranging from homemakers, government executives, and students to retirees - who will surf the web, make online purchases and register for promotions.

The participants, as reported by CNN, had been been provided with a clean laptop without spam protection and a new email address. The participants will blog about their experiences daily at http://www.mcafee.com/spamexperiment.

The experiment is to prove the link between spam and cybercrime and to show the devastating effects of spam.

S.P.A.M. Experiment participants are from ten countries spanning the globe, including Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, Italy, Mexico, the Netherlands, Spain, the United Kingdom and the United States.

McAfee McAfee, Inc. is based in California and is the world’s largest dedicated security technology company.