THE STATUS OF STATISTICS ON WOMEN AND MEN’S ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN THE UNECE REGION Costanza Giovannelli, Hrund Gunnsteinsdottir, Angela Me UN Economic Commission for Europe - Statistical Division Workshop on Improving Statistics on SMEs and Entrepreneurship OECD- Paris September 2003

Changing the focus… From characteristics of enterprises to characteristics of people managing/owning the enterprises

The questionnaire Questionnaire to National Statistical Offices in the ECE region:  Official statistics  Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SME) Entrepreneurship NOT only in the context of SME Three main sections: i) availability of selected indicators ii) sources and methods iii) dissemination

Why is it important to study entrepreneurship and gender in SME context?  More self-employed women are involved in the SME sector creating new job and contributing to poverty reduction  Emerging role of women

Definition of Entrepreneurs  Owners  Managers  Executive directors, central board executives …more generally: those who were involved in the establishment of the business those responsible for its development Business and Entrepreneurship Survey (Ireland): “an owner, part-owner and/or the principal manager responsible for the expansion and strategic development of the business”

Definition of Entrepreneurs  Lack of common frameworks to define entrepreneurs  Difficult to translate the concept of entrepreneurship into statistical measures using existing data collections Studies on entrepreneurship are based on a assortment of indicators according to the available sources

Indicators on Entrepreneurs Own-account workers Employers Owners Managers Self-employed Members of Ex. Boards

Information can be found in…. Households  Status in employment  Self-employed  Own-account workers  Employers  Occupation  Managers  People in supervisory position Enterprises  Owners  Executive Directors

Information can be found in…. Households Sex disaggregated data Characteristics of the entrepreneur No information on type of enterprise Difficult to measure owners Enterprises Information on type of enterprise Gender is not always collected Registers are not fully reliable in all countries Registers or surveys may be limited to certain types of enterprises Not for statistical purposes

The Availability of Statistical Indicators

Self-employment: caution Self-employment, employers and own-account workers; women as a percentage of women and men; agricultural sector as a percentage of total employment, some ECE countries – 2001 (a) 2000 Source: UNECE – Gender Statistics Database

Problems and gaps Use of several sources:  Lack of comparability, different classifications for example in Poland the classification of the status in employment used in the enterprise survey is different from the one used in the LFS  Coverage issues  Registers are of limited use in countries with a large informal economy  In existing sources, the challenge is to have sex disaggregated data

Future challenges in official statistics  To identify the policy relevant issues of women and men entrepreneurs in order to clarify the objectives of the data collection  To reach an agreement on a working definition or a common framework on entrepreneurship and other relevant key concepts  To harmonize among countries and within countries statistical concepts related to the collection and dissemination of data

Future challenges in official statistics  To incorporate the gender dimension in the collection and dissemination of SME statistics  To identify expertise and best practices in the region, which could be used as a basis for the standard ways in which official statistics on women and men’s entrepreneurship will be collected by NSOs in the region