An analysis is carried out of the total burden that a national statistical institute imposes on businesses for the purpose of data collection, as well as of the businesses' response behaviour. A descriptive overview presents distribution of the response burden, expressed in terms of number of surveys, survey instances, and total expected time under compliance, among business size and industry classes. A multi-level analysis indicates that too high levels of response burden of a business lead to

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... business's reduced participation in new survey instances. There is an indication that businesses that are nonrespondents in the first instance of a survey risk remaining nonrespondents, indicating that a particular attention needs to be paid to them.