10. Reader’s guide for the country profiles
Inclusive entrepreneurship trends and policies vary greatly across countries. This section presents a short overview of inclusive entrepreneurship trends, issues and recent policy developments in each of the 27 European Union Member States. Each profile includes a set of key indicators that benchmark self-employment and entrepreneurship activity rates and barriers in each country relative to the European Union average for men, women, youth and seniors.
This section provides a short overview of inclusive entrepreneurship trends and recent policy actions in each European Union (EU) Member State. Each Country Profile presents recent trends for key inclusive entrepreneurship indicators, focusing on self-employment and entrepreneurship activity rates, motivations for business creation and growth aspirations for women, immigrant, youth and senior entrepreneurs. In addition, the Country Profiles highlight recent policy developments related to inclusive entrepreneurship and a hot inclusive entrepreneurship policy issue, which briefly discusses a topical policy issue or challenge.
The Country Profiles include a common set of country-specific data that benchmark key inclusive entrepreneurship indicators against the EU average. Data are presented for men, women, youth, seniors, immigrants and people with disabilities to the extent possible. These data help to show the scale of the challenge and its recent evolution. Each country profile contains six figures:
Panel a: Conditions for entrepreneurship, 2022. This figure presents four indicators to provide an overview of the conditions for business creation in each country:
Business entry and exit rates are from 2020 and are defined as (Eurostat, 2023[1]):
SME lending is defined as the share of SME loans to total outstanding business loans in 2021 (OECD, 2023[2]).
Entrepreneurship skills is defined as the percentage of the adult population (18-64 years old) – excluding individuals involved in any stage of entrepreneurial activity – who believe that they have the required skills and knowledge to start a business. This indicator covers the period 2018 to 2022 (GEM, 2023[3]).
Panel b: Total Early-stage Entrepreneurship Activity (TEA) rate, 2018-22. This presents the proportion of the adult population (18-64 years old) that is actively involved in starting a business or who is the owner-operator of a business that is less than 42 months old. Data are presented for the overall population, men, women, youth (18-30 years old) and seniors (50-64 years old) for the period 2018 to 2022 (GEM, 2023[3]).
Panel c: Proportion of TEA that is necessity-based entrepreneurship, 2018-22. This presents the proportion of early-stage entrepreneurs (18-64 years old) who launched their business due to a lack of other opportunities in the labour market. Data are presented for the overall population, men, women, youth (18-30 years old) and seniors (50-64 years old) for the period 2018 to 2022 (GEM, 2023[3]).
Panel d: Proportion of early-stage entrepreneurs who expect to create more than 19 jobs in five years, 2018-22. This presents the proportion of early-stage entrepreneurs (18-64 years old) who anticipate the creation of at least 19 additional new jobs over the next five years. Data are presented for the overall population, men, women, youth (18-30 years old) and seniors (50-64 years old) for the period 2018 to 2022 (GEM, 2023[3]).
Panel e: Self-employment rate. This presents the proportion of those aged 15-64 years old in employment who are self-employed. Data are presented for the overall population, women, immigrants, youth (20-29 years old) and seniors (50-64 years old) for the period 2013 to 2022 (Eurostat, 2023[4]).
Panel f: Proportion of self-employed people that have employees. This presents the share of the self-employed (15-64 years old) that employ at least one other person. Data are presented for the overall population, women, immigrants, youth (20-29 years old) and seniors (50-64 years old) for the period 2013 to 2022 (Eurostat, 2023[4]).
In Panel a, the data for the EU median for SME lending do not cover the following countries because data are not available: Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Denmark, Finland, Germany, Luxembourg, Malta and Romania. The EU median for the entrepreneurship skills indicator does not cover some countries because data are not available: Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia and Malta.
In Panels b-d, the data for the EU average refers to a population-weighted average and excludes Belgium, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Estonia and Malta because the survey was not administered in these countries over this period. In addition, some countries did not participate in every year over this period: Austria (did not participate in 2019 and 2021), Bulgaria (2019-22), Finland (2018-20 and 2022), France (2019-21), Hungary (2018-20), Ireland (2020 and 2022), Latvia (2018), Lithuania (2018-21) and Portugal (2018, 2020 and 2022).
This set of Country Profiles draw on country-specific reports that are produced as part of the OECD and European Commission on inclusive entrepreneurship policies and programmes (OECD, 2023[5]). These reports are available at: https://www.oecd.org/cfe/smes/inclusive-entrepreneurshippolicies-country-assessment-notes.htm.
References
[4] Eurostat (2023), Employment and Unemployment (LFS) Database, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/lfs/database (accessed on 23 May 2023).
[1] Eurostat (2023), Structural Business Statistics, https://ec.europa.eu/eurostat/web/structural-business-statistics (accessed on 27 July 2023).
[3] GEM (2023), Special tabulations for the OECD of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) adult population survey for the years 2018 to 2022.
[5] OECD (2023), “Inclusive Entrepreneurship Policies: Country Assessment Notes”, https://www.oecd.org/cfe/smes/inclusive-entrepreneurship-policies-country-assessment-notes.htm (accessed on 18 July 2023).
[2] OECD (2023), OECD Financing SMEs and Entrepreneurs Scoreboard: 2023 Highlights.