Small and Medium Enterprises across the Globe: A New Database

By Meghana Ayyagari. 2003

410 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper describes a new cross-country database on the importance of small and medium enterprises (SMEs). This database is unique in that it presents consistent and comparable information on the contribution of the SME sector to total employment and GDP across different countries. The dataset improves on existing publicly available datasets on several grounds. First, it extends coverage to a broader set of developing and industrial economies. Second, it provides information on the contribution of the SME sector using a uniform definition of SMEs across different countries, allowing for consistent cross-country comparisons. Third, while we follow the traditional definition of the SME sector as being part of the formal sector, the new database also includes the size of the SME sector relative to the informal sector. This paper describes the sources and the construction of the different indicators, presents descriptive statistics, and explores correlations with other socioeconomic variables.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/24f87b59747529e99d0872cb82836a2ce3e73cd6

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Citations in the corpus

Bankruptcy Around the World: Explanations of its Relative Use (2002, methodology): “To control for the effect of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), we use the percentage of employment attributed to SMEs, as collected by Ayyagari et al. (2003) and call this variable SME-EMP.”
Explaining the lack of strategic planning in SMEs: The importance of owner motivation (2007, background): “At a macro level, SMEs have created the majority of new jobs in OECD countries since the 1970s (Peacock 2004) and their collective contributions to respective GDPs (e.g., approximately 30% in Australia and New Zealand, 51% in the UK and USA, 57% in Canada and Japan, 76% in Luxembourg) belie their in”