The breakdown of employment by size class describes how total employment is distributed among enterprises of different sizes. It provides important information on the ability of firms of various sizes to foster employment.

Value added by enterprise size class describes the contribution of enterprises of different sizes to total value added of the business sector. This indicator contributes to improve understanding of the relative importance of different size classes in generating value added in a country’s economy.

Exports by enterprise size class describe the contribution of enterprises of different sizes to total exports. This indicator provides information on the importance of small and larger firms in shaping a country’s position in the global economy.

The death of enterprises is an integral part of the phenomenon of entrepreneurship. Knowing the percentage of firms that die in a given year and comparing it over time and across countries is of high interest to policy makers to understand, for example, the impact of structural and cyclical effects on the disappearance of enterprises.

The churn rate, i.e. the sum of births and deaths of enterprises, indicates how frequently new firms are created and how often existing enterprises close down. In fact, the number of births and deaths of enterprises accounts for a sizeable proportion of the total number of firms in most economies. The indicator reflects a country’s degree of creative destruction, and it is of high interest for analysing, for example, the contribution of firm churning to aggregate productivity growth.

Observing the post-entry performance of firms is as important as analysing their birth rate. The survival rate of enterprises provides information on the share of enterprises surviving one or more years after birth, and allows to investigate questions such as how long do start-ups survive after creation and the differences in survival rates of enterprises across countries and industries.

The comparison of the employment share of one-year (two-year) old enterprises in their year of birth with their employment share after one year (two years) of existence, provides an indication of how rapidly the young surviving enterprises are increasing their number of persons employed beyond the initial level and contribute to overall employment changes in the economy.

Gazelles represent the young enterprises among the -population of high-growth enterprises. Their role in job creation is of particular interest to policy makers.

Statistics on the share, size and industry distribution of women and men-owned enterprises provide key information on gender differences in entrepreneurship. They enable comparisons of the economic importance of women-owned enterprises across countries and over time. Moreover, they show how women entrepreneurs tend to own relatively smaller enterprises and select different industries with respect to men. The statistics have been primarily obtained by linking business registers to population registers or other administrative data. They are limited to sole-proprietor enterprises given the complexity of classifying enterprises with more than one owner along gender lines.

The contribution of women-owned enterprises to employment creation is still poorly documented. Comparable data on employment in women and men-owned enterprises provide indications about the relative contribution of enterprises held by women to job creation. The breakdown by size classes compares the capacities of differently sized women-owned enterprises to generate employment.

The birth rate of women-owned enterprises provides essential information about the dynamism of women’s entrepreneurship. Statistics on births and deaths, together with information on related employment generation and destruction, can tell whether the economic weight of women entrepreneurs is converging to the one of men. They can also inform about the effects of economic downturns on the dynamics of women and men entrepreneurship.

Policy makers can monitor the relative performance of women-owned enterprises by looking at their rate of survival and at their capacity to generate jobs during the first years of activity. Gender-disaggregated indicators on survival and employment growth allow to investigate questions such as the resilience and the growth performance of women-owned enterprises.

The low presence of women on company boards is often cited as a signal of the obstacles women face in climbing the corporate ladder. Several countries are considering the introduction of quotas, to enforce a minimum level of representation of women on corporate boards.

The ease to financial access is an important factor for starting and growing a business. Financing needs however vary between enterprises with different growth characteristics. The development of information about the sources most used by different types of enterprises and the responses they obtain to their requests of finance contributes to improve policy makers understanding of entrepreneurial finance and the difficulties faced by firms aiming at growing their business.

The entrepreneurial culture in a country affects the attitude that individuals have towards entrepreneurship, the likelihood of choosing entrepreneurship as a career, the ambitions to success and start again after a failure, or the support provided to family and relatives planning to set up a business. All these aspects play a role, although there is scarce empirical evidence on their relative importance and differences across countries. This section provides examples of indicators that have been developed to measure certain aspects of the entrepreneurial culture related to the image of entrepreneurs and to individuals’ perceptions of their own ability as would-be entrepreneurs.