A new tool
to empower research-based decision-making on government policies
involving entrepreneurship has been developed by the Organization
for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), with funding and
cooperation from the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation.
The creation of the OECD-Eurostat Entrepreneurship Indicators
Program (EIP) was a joint effort of the OECD, a consortium of 30
industrial democracies, and Eurostat, the statistical office of the
European Communities. In 2005, the Kauffman Foundation provided the
OECD the financial support for a feasibility study to explore what
could be done to improve entrepreneurship data. Seven countries—Canada,
Denmark, the Netherlands, Finland, Norway, Sweden and the United
States—added financial and intellectual support for the work. In 2007,
Eurostat formally joined forces with the OECD to create the joint
OECD-Eurostat EIP, whose aim is to create a durable, long-term program
of policy-relevant entrepreneurship statistics.
The EIP establishes multiple measures of internationally
comparable data on entrepreneurial activity in 18 OECD countries, based
on information produced by national statistical offices according to
internationally agreed definitions. Policy-makers and citizens alike
can now measure their countries' entrepreneurial performance, and
compare it with other countries.
The first data digest based on the EIP, "Measuring
Entrepreneurship: A Digest of Indicators," has now been released.
Entrepreneurial activity in 18 different nations is compared and
contrasted in the report, available at www.oecd.org/statistics/entrepreneurshipindicators 
According to the report, new EU countries that underwent
structural changes in their economies saw significant entrepreneurial
activity. Countries like Lithuania, Estonia, Latvia, Hungary, Romania
and the Slovak Republic created a greater number of "employer firms"
(those with at least one employee) and high-growth firms than in most
other countries.
Findings for the developed countries in the report show some
indicators with little variety and others with great differences. The
one-year survival rate for new employer enterprises ranges from nearly
85 percent in Canada to nearly 60 percent in the Netherlands. The share
of high-growth enterprises as a percentage of enterprises with 10 or
more employees, for example, shows big differences between
manufacturing and services. The United States has close to 5 percent in
both industry classifications, but countries such as Denmark, Finland
and Italy show nearly twice as many high-growth enterprises in services
than manufacturing.
The release of the entrepreneurship data coincides with Global
Entrepreneurship Week, a first-ever collaborative effort of more than
75 countries to highlight the importance of entrepreneurship to young
workers and college students and to encourage more of them to become
more innovative and entrepreneurial.
