Title: THE STATUS OF STATISTICS ON WOMEN AND MEN’S ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN THE UNECE REGION
1THE STATUS OF STATISTICS ON WOMEN AND MENS
ENTREPRENEURSHIP IN THE UNECE REGION
Workshop on Improving Statistics on SMEs and
Entrepreneurship OECD- Paris 17-19 September 2003
- Costanza Giovannelli, Hrund Gunnsteinsdottir,
Angela Me - UN Economic Commission for Europe -
Statistical Division
2Changing the focus
- From characteristics of enterprises
- to characteristics of people managing/owning the
enterprises
3The questionnaire
- Questionnaire to National Statistical Offices in
the ECE region - Official statistics
- Small and Medium Sized Enterprises (SME)
- Entrepreneurship NOT only in the context of SME
- Three main sections
- i) availability of selected indicators
- ii) sources and methods
- iii) dissemination
4Why is it important to study entrepreneurship and
gender in SME context?
- More self-employed women are involved in the SME
sector creating new job and contributing to
poverty reduction - Emerging role of women
-
5Definition of Entrepreneurs
- Owners
- Managers
- Executive directors, central board executives
- more generally
- those who were involved in the establishment of
the business - those responsible for its development
-
Business and Entrepreneurship Survey (Ireland)
an owner, part-owner and/or the principal
manager responsible for the expansion and
strategic development of the business
6Definition of Entrepreneurs
- Lack of common frameworks to define entrepreneurs
- Difficult to translate the concept of
entrepreneurship into statistical measures using
existing data collections -
Studies on entrepreneurship are based on a
assortment of indicators according to the
available sources
7Indicators on Entrepreneurs
Managers
Self-employed
Employers
Own-account workers
Members of Ex. Boards
Owners
8Information can be found in.
- Households
- Status in employment
- Self-employed
- Own-account workers
- Employers
- Occupation
- Managers
- People in supervisory position
- Enterprises
- Owners
- Executive Directors
-
9Information can be found in.
- Households
- Sex disaggregated data
- Characteristics of the entrepreneur
- No information on type of enterprise
- Difficult to measure owners
- Enterprises
- Information on type of enterprise
- Gender is not always collected
- Registers are not fully reliable in all
countries - Registers or surveys may be limited to certain
types of enterprises - Not for statistical purposes
10The Availability of Statistical Indicators
11Self-employment caution
Self-employment, employers and own-account
workers women as a percentage of women and men
agricultural sector as a percentage of total
employment, some ECE countries 2001
(a) 2000 Source UNECE Gender Statistics
Database
12Problems and gaps
- Use of several sources
- Lack of comparability, different classifications
- for example in Poland the classification of the
status in employment used in the enterprise
survey is different from the one used in the LFS - Coverage issues
- Registers are of limited use in countries with a
large informal economy - In existing sources, the challenge is to have sex
disaggregated data -
13Future challenges in official statistics
- To identify the policy relevant issues of women
and men entrepreneurs in order to clarify the
objectives of the data collection - To reach an agreement on a working definition or
a common framework on entrepreneurship and other
relevant key concepts - To harmonize among countries and within countries
statistical concepts related to the collection
and dissemination of data
14Future challenges in official statistics
- To incorporate the gender dimension in the
collection and dissemination of SME statistics - To identify expertise and best practices in the
region, which could be used as a basis for the
standard ways in which official statistics on
women and mens entrepreneurship will be
collected by NSOs in the region