Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises - Economic Indicators (MSME-EI) Analysis Note December 2019

This note provides an overview of the MSME Economic Indicators (MSME-EI) database, previously known as the MSME Country Indicators database. It collates the official country level definitions of Micro, Small, and Medium Enterprises (MSMEs) from over 176 economies. The comprehensive database is a unique data source that highlights the variety of definitions, allowing the IFC to assess the use of the definition across economies. The latest data suggests the following observations: First, the number of employees continues to be the most widely used variable for defining MSMES across economies. However, the thresholds for classifying an enterprise by size vary across countries — and, sometimes, even within a country. Second, in the 77 economies where data is available, there are 322 million formal MSMEs employing almost 72 percent of private sector employees. Third, MSME density as measured by the number of formal MSMEs per 1,000 people, is higher in high-income economies. However, the growth rate in the number of MSMEs is highest among low- and middle-income economies and countries in Europe and Central Asia. Since 2007, the International Finance Corporation (IFC) has been collecting publicly available official MSME definitions used by economies around the world. This has enabled the IFC to build four large cross-section and time-series data sets with observations for the years 2007, 2010, 20141, and 2019.2 The previous updates were called MSME Country Indicators. However, this update, launched in 2019, is called MSME Economic Indicators (MSME-EI) to reflect the expanded number of new economic indicators covered by the dataset. The data for the 2019 update were collected between July and December of 2018.