Entrepreneurship at a Glance presents key indicators on entrepreneurship. Until recently, most entrepreneurship research relied on ad hoc data compilations developed to support specific projects and virtually no official statistics on the subject existed. The collection of harmonised indicators presented in this publication is the result of the OECD-Eurostat Entrepreneurship Indicators Programme (EIP). The programme, started in 2006, is the first attempt to compile and publish international data on entrepreneurship from official government statistical sources. Indeed, to meet the challenge of providing new entrepreneurship indicators, while minimising costs for national statistical offices and burden on business, the programme focuses attention on exploiting existing sources of data instead of developing new business surveys. Statistical business registers form the basis for the compilation of the key EIP indicators, such as enterprise birth and death rates.

The global financial and economic crisis has increased attention on entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurship and entrepreneurs have long been recognised as important sources of innovation, and thereby also of growth and employment. The recent crisis, characterised by tighter credit restrictions, has arguably hampered new start-ups and impeded growth in existing start-ups as well as their ability to survive in tough market conditions. The significant rise in business closures, especially of micro and small enterprises, in recent years, bears stark witness to these difficult conditions and highlights the need for statistics on entrepreneurship that can support policy makers. Entrepreneurship at a Glance contains a wide range of internationally comparable measures of entrepreneurship designed to meet this need.

This publication presents indicators of entrepreneurship collected by the OECD-Eurostat Entrepreneurship Indicators Programme (EIP). Started in 2006, the programme develops multiple measures of entrepreneurship and its determinants according to a simplified conceptual framework that distinguishes between the manifestation of entrepreneurship, the factors that influence it, and the impacts of entrepreneurship on the economy and society. A set of indicators of entrepreneurial performance is proposed for understanding and comparing the amount and type of entrepreneurship which take place in different countries. This approach reflects the idea that analysts should not focus only on enterprise creation or any other single measure to study entrepreneurship: entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial forces can be found in many existing businesses and understanding the dynamism these actors exert on the economy is as important as understanding the dynamics of start-ups.

This Annex presents the sources and definitions used to develop the OECD Timely Indicators of Entrepreneurship; two separate tables refer to enterprise creations and bankruptcies respectively.

This Annex presents a comprehensive list of indicators of entrepreneurial determinants. The list draws from past work conducted by FORA (Ministry of Economic and Business Affairs, Division for Research and Analysis, Denmark) for the annual report “Quality Assessment of Entrepreneurship Indicators, which was discontinued in 2012. Indicators are classified into the six categories of determinants set by the OECD-Eurostat Entrepreneurship Indicators Programme: 1. Regulatory Framework; 2. Market Conditions; 3. Access to Finance; 4; Creation and Diffusion of Knowledge; 5. Entrepreneurial Capabilities; 6. Entrepreneurial Culture. For each indicator, a short description and the source of data are provided.

Aggregate data on venture capital provide useful information on trends in the venture capital industry. These data are typically compiled by national or regional Private Equity and Venture Capital Associations, often with the support of commercial data providers. The quality and availability of aggregate data on venture capital have improved considerably in recent years; however, international comparisons remain complicated because of two main problems.