Monitoring and Evaluation of SME and Entrepreneurship Policies

The SME and Entrepreneurship Evaluation Framework 2023 aims to support and encourage policy makers to conduct reliable evaluations of the impact of SME and entrepreneurship policies and to use evaluation evidence to inform policy design and implementation.

The 2023 Framework is an update to a previous Framework produced by the OECD 15 years earlier. The new Framework takes account of recent developments in both the techniques and data sources available for SME and entrepreneurship policy evaluation and in the scope and practice of SME and entrepreneurship policy.

The Framework highlights several issues that need to be addressed by the SME and entrepreneurship policy community. Its overall concern is that the evaluation evidence on the impact of SME and entrepreneurship policy remains weak. It signals priorities for improving the evaluation evidence base in the field of SME and entrepreneurship policy. These include setting clear objectives and targets for each SME and entrepreneurship policy action, measuring impact against the common metrics of employment, sales, business start-up and business survival, and establishing effective control groups. The Framework also discusses the findings from 50 reliable evaluations of SME and entrepreneurship programmes in OECD countries. 

The Framework serves as a foundation of the OECD’s tailored support to countries for strengthening their impact evaluation of SME and entrepreneurship policy. Thus, the key considerations for successful evaluation set out in this volume are taken up in one-to-one OECD advice, where requested by governments, on creating effective policy monitoring and reporting systems and in deciding on potential methodologies for evaluating major programmes.