Over the past ten years, the OECD has addressed entrepreneurship issues in various analyses and reports. While these studies compiled relevant data to support specific research or policy tasks, no effort was made to establish an ongoing database of entrepreneurship across OECD countries. In 2004, the 2nd OECD Ministerial Conference on SMEs in Istanbul, “Promoting Entrepreneurship and Innovative SMEs in a Global Economy”, concluded that the statistical base for entrepreneurship research was weak and urged the OECD to develop “a robust and comparable statistical base on which SME policy can be developed”.

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.

Encouraged by the feasibility study, the OECD launched the Entrepreneurship Indicators Programme (EIP) in 2006 in order to build internationally comparable statistics on entrepreneurship and its determinants. In 2007, Eurostat joined forces with the OECD to create a joint OECD-Eurostat EIP, and work began with the development of standard definitions and concepts as a basis for the collection of empirical data.

This report presents the results of the second round of empirical data collected under the EIP.

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Foreword