High and rising unemployment rates in the early 1990s have moved the employment question centrestage in the policy debate. Among the structural aspects, the relation between firm size and employment creation has attracted policy makers’ attention, triggered by empirical work on the United States which showed that the small business sector had been a major source of net job creation. This work and the rising interest by policymakers led to further studies of the subject, the identification of important methodological and data questions and a broader body of empirical research about the relation between firm size and job creation.

This document aims at identifying common results and trends from national studies, as well as identifying “best practices” of analysis and data gathering, and thereby promoting international harmonisation of such analytical work. Principal results from a survey of national studies include: (a) both the rates of gross job creations and gross job losses are ...