Participating countries chosen by the European Commission to start compiling data on family businesses. Launched in 2015, the European Commission’s call for tender on ‘Statistics for Family Businesses’ will start this year.

Launched in 2015, the European Commission’s call for tender on ‘Statistics for Family Businesses’ will start this year. As explained by the Commission, ‘the aim of this call is to provide policy-makers and relevant stakeholders for credible, comparable and systematic information and indicators on the role of the family businesses in national economies and to offer usable and practical information to stakeholders for their decision making.’

The national projects will obviously try and establish the weight of the family business sector in the chosen countries, but the project will also try to ascertain ‘the performance of each group of family owned enterprises within the economy, the value of the goods and services produced, the employment generated, evaluation the sector in terms of its contribution to GDP, jobs, capital investment and tax revenues, its role in the balance of payment and other information.’

For EFB, what makes this project particularly significant is that respective official statistical offices (national, federal or regional) must be involved in each selected country. This breaks away from the majority of available worldwide family business data, which has been compiled by private institutions or universities. We hope that this project is the start of regular annual statistical compilations, by EU Member States on this business sector.

The selected countries will be announced by the Executive Agency for Small and Medium-sized Enterprises in due course.