For many years, economists and policymakers have identified "entrepreneurs" as important drivers for employment, innovation and economic growth. While it is generally accepted that entrepreneurship is "good", neither the drivers of entrepreneurship nor the links between entrepreneurship and its potential impacts, on economic growth for example, are well understood. This knowledge gap largely reflects the lack of internationally accepted, coherent and comparable definitions for, and indicators on, entrepreneurs, entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurial activity.

The growing interest, in both developed and developing countries, in how government policies and other national business environment factors influence the rates and types of entrepreneurship development has focused even greater attention on this information gap. In an increasingly globalised world, policy makers and analysts alike need to evaluate entrepreneurship policies across countries.

In September 2006, the OECD launched a new Entrepreneurship Indicators Programme (EIP) to address this information gap and build internationally comparable statistics on entrepreneurship and its determinants. The aim of the EIP is to create a durable, long-term programme of policy-relevant entrepreneurship statistics. As such, the work involves developing standard definitions and concepts and engaging countries and international Agencies in the collection of data.

Importantly, in early 2007, Eurostat, the statistical agency of the European Commission, became a partner in this activity and the EIP is now a joint OECD-Eurostat Programme.

• Read more about the EIP
• Measuring entrepreneurship: a digest of indicators, 2009 edition
• Project on timely indicators