The Data Lake as a “one-stop-shop” aims to support the international benchmarking of SME and Entrepreneurship, and the monitoring of OECD Recommendations on SME and Entrepreneurship policies.
OECD Data Lake on SMEs and Entrepreneurship
The OECD Data Lake is the go-to platform for accessing essential statistics, policy insights, and visualisation tools on SMEs and Entrepreneurship, their business conditions and policies. It proposes an overview of the evidence base, data and action taken across OECD countries to unlock the potential of SMEs and entrepreneurs for innovation, competitiveness, economic development, and sustainability.
About
What can you find in the Data Lake?
The SME&E Data Lake pools together statistics and qualitative information, with visualisation tools, to monitor SME&E performance, business conditions and policy environment.
How SMEs and entrepreneurs perform depends on their business environment, including a range of institutional, regulatory, infrastructural and market conditions. Additionally, their access to strategic resources, such as finance, skills and innovation assets (e.g., technology, data, knowledge and networks) plays a crucial role. Effective SME&E policies and good governance, including policy coordination and evaluation, are also critical to enable all types of SMEs and entrepreneurs to compete and adapt.
Technical information
Indicators come from various international sources, including OECD but not only. Indicators have been selected based on criteria of SME&E policy relevance, OECD country coverage and international comparability (across countries), and regularity in data collection and fair comparability over time (avoiding one-off exercise). More indicators may be available and not included.
- Inventory of indicators (xls) - Link
- Inventory of sources (xls) - Link
Data latest update: 30 September 2024.
A Smart Monitoring System of SME&E Policy
The SME&E policy field is characterised by a high data fragmentation and significant evidence gaps.
While many useful statistics and data exist, they often rely on different methodologies, priority agendas and management systems, which increases cost, and reduces efficiency and timeliness, in responding to policy needs. In addition, there is no internationally harmonised source on policies and institutions in place in countries to support SMEs and entrepreneurs.
This fragmentation illustrates the cross-cutting nature of SME&E policies that link and intersect different policy areas and work streams.
In response, the OECD has developed a Data Lake on SMEs and Entrepreneurship. In line with the OECD Smart Data Strategy, the Data Lake enables data integration from various sources and policy communities, helps reduce data fragmentation and costs, enables data sharing and reuse, and increases our analytical capacity.
- Create a comprehensive picture of the SME&E data landscape, and ease access from either OECD or other sources.
- Increase capacity for policy analysis with data concentration in a single digital space and promote experimentation of new data science techniques.
- Provide a framework for advancing the data agenda and for data partnerships by co-innovating and co-investing in (new) data commons with interested partners and organisations.
- Support SME&E policy mainstreaming: through a broader dissemination of the SME&E policy messages and considerations.
Joining the initiative
Countries, national statistical offices (NSOs), international organisations, data providers, chambers of commerce, business associations and the private sector are invited to join the OECD SME & Entrepreneurship Data Lake initiative and contribute to collective efforts to renew the data agenda for SME&E policy and explore opportunities for data and capacity partnerships.
