OECD-Eurostat Entrepreneurship Indicators Programme: Comparable International Measures of Entrepreneurship and the Factors that Enhance or Impede It

Entrepreneurship has been identified as a high priority and emerging policy area for governments throughout the world, especially during the current crisis. The rapid pace of economic restructuring and change means that business statistics must do a better job of describing the dynamics of business creation, development and growth. What are the factors that encourage or impede the desired outcomes? And how do the situations in different countries compare? It is not sufficient to examine any economy in isolation; data must be consistent and comparable across countries. This chapter describes the work by the OECD and Eurostat to develop comparable enterprise-based data sets to assist researchers, policy analysts and policymakers in understanding the entrepreneurial performance of countries and how such performance can be transformed through policy tools. Governments have embraced fact-based policymaking and have appealed to National Statistics Offices for the information they need. The OECD-Eurostat Entrepreneurship Indicators Programme (EIP) is an attempt by national and international statisticians to respond to the challenge. In cooperation with statistical experts in NSOs and the policy analysts who will use the data, the EIP identified data requirements and set out to satisfy them, primarily using data from existing sources. A number of countries were part of the pioneering effort to develop core concepts and prove that the data could be produced. Eurostat and the OECD are moving ahead with the programme and invite all others to join.