The OECD-Eurostat Entrepreneurship Indicator Programme (EIP)
Over the past ten years, the OECD has addressed entrepreneurship issues in various analyses and reports. While these studies compiled relevant data to support specific research or policy tasks, no effort was made to establish an ongoing database of entrepreneurship across OECD countries. In 2004, the 2nd OECD Ministerial
Conference on SMEs in Istanbul, "Promoting Entrepreneurship and Innovative SMEs in a Global Economy", concluded that the statistical base for entrepreneurship research was weak and urged the OECD to develop "a robust and comparable statistical base on which SME policy can be developed".
The OECD launched the Entrepreneurship Indicators Programme (EIP) in 2006 in order to build internationally comparable statistics on entrepreneurship and its determinants. In 2007, Eurostat joined forces with the OECD to create a joint OECD/Eurostat EIP, and work began with the development of standard definitions and concepts as a basis for the collection of empirical data.
Entrepreneurship is a multifaceted concept that manifests itself in many different ways, with the result that various definitions have emerged and no single definition has been generally agreed upon. Several definitions have an essentially theoretical basis and are not concerned with measurement. Another strand of research has largely bypassed the question of definition by "defining" entrepreneurship in terms of a specific empirical measure, such as self-employment or the number of small firms. Not surprisingly, these are measures that are readily available.
The OECD-Eurostat approach has tried to combine the more conceptual definitions of entrepreneurship with (available) empirical indicators. Building on the theoretical contributions of Richard Cantillon, Adam Smith, Jean Baptiste Say, Alfred Marshall, Joseph Schumpeter, Israel Kirzner and Frank Knight, among others, the following definitions were established:
Entrepreneurs are those persons (business owners) who seek to generate value through the creation or expansion of economic activity, by identifying and exploiting new products, processes or markets.
Entrepreneurial activity is enterprising human action in pursuit of the generation of value through the creation or expansion of economic activity, by identifying and exploiting new products, processes or markets.
Entrepreneurship is the phenomenon associated with entrepreneurial activity.
Given the multifaceted nature of entrepreneurship and the multitude of factors that may affect it, establishing a realistic yet relevant set of measures to be produced as core entrepreneurship indicators was a major challenge. Inspired by a number of previous scholarly and policy-oriented studies, a simple entrepreneurship model was proposed as a first step towards establishing a framework for the development of empirical indicators that are both relevant and available.
