The creation of new businesses and the decline of unproductive ones are often regarded key to
business dynamism in OECD economies. Understanding business behaviour, creative destruction and
identifying successful and failing businesses, as well as fostering entrepreneurship and innovation, have
become increasingly important objectives for policy makers in many OECD economies in recent years.
However, despite its growing importance, the study of business dynamics, and entrepreneurship more
generally, is hampered by the lack of truly internationally comparable indicators. That is not for a lack of
data however, as many statistical institutions and private agencies produce statistics in this domain, but
because they lack comparability, are of questionable quality, or are not able to tackle all of the policy
questions related to these issues, they can often generate confusion, giving mixed messages to policy
makers. The framework of business demography indicators presented in this paper is an attempt to fill this
gap by providing a mechanism by which more comparable indicators of business demography can be
produced across OECD countries in particular, considering both what is practically achievable and
