1. SME Statistics OECD Workshop
Item 9- Enterprise demography
Merja Hult/ Eurostat
18 September 2003 1 1

2. Business Demography development project
Council of Lisbon targets
High need for harmonised statistics on business demography at national and EU-level
Challenge:
how to produce comparable data with the tools currently available, with limited burden and in a timely fashion
18 September 2003 2

3. Methodological issues
Joint methodology developed based on analysis of Business Register data
BRs – EU-legislation lead to improved quality, national sources affect coverage
Matching and manual checks used
Statistical unit: Enterprise
18 September 2003 2

4. Methodological issues
Aim to produce data on genuine enterprise births and deaths
Survival is defined as continuity of activity unchanged or take-over by a new enterprise, not counting ‘birthdays’
Activity status verified, no threshold for activity
18 September 2003 2

5. Some results
Data collected for NACE sections C-O, excluding L and (holdings)
Country availability: BE, DK, ES, IT, LU, NL, PT, FIN, SE, UK and NO
Reference years for births, survival of newly born enterprises from 98-00, deaths
Data presented here refer to NACE C-K
18 September 2003 2

6. Newly born enterprises in 2000-share of private sector economy

7. 2

8. Births-Breakdown by size class, 2000, private sector economy
EU-10 B DK E I L NL P
FIN S UK NO
Total
100.0 :
80.2
82.1
70.3
90.4
62.5
62.3
67.3
86.1
28.0
1-4
15.7
23.9
8.1
30.8
32.6
28.7
12.9
63.4
5-9
1.4
1.0
4.0
2.6
0.7
6.0
10-19
1.7
1.8
1.1
0.2
2.2
20+
0.9
0.3
0.0
0.4 2

9. Survival rates for newly born enterprises 1998-2000, in private sector economy

10. 2

11. Average number of persons employed in births
EU-10 B DK E I L NL P
FIN S UK NO
Private sector
1998 :
1.2
1.3
2.1
1.4
2.2
2.0
0.5
1.7
economy
1999
1.8
0.4
1.1
2000
1.6
Industry
1.5
3.9
5.9
3.3
3.1
2.4
4.1
2.6
0.3
1.9
Construction
3.0
5.4
0.6
2.9
4.6
2.8
4.3
Services
2.3
DK, NL and FIN in FTEs

12. Employment impact
Initial size very small
Newly born enterprises in 1998 had 1.65 million persons employed
In the participating countries, between 15-32% of ‘original’ jobs were lost due to failure to survive from 1998 to 2000
The surviving enterprises created more jobs, growing on average by 16%