Press Release: Small Businesses: Better policy support for EU’s job engine

With the onset of the economic crisis in 2008, a very positive development of small and medium enterprises (SME) came to a halt. Between 2002 and 2008, SMEs in the EU turned out to be the most important European economy job engine. With 9.4 million jobs created between 2002 and 2008 SMEs outperformed large firms. This is in sharp contrast to an estimated loss of 3.25 million jobs in the SME sector over 2009 and 2010 further to the annual SME report published on 11 June 2010.

For each EU Member State and 10 more countries, selected key facts describing the national SME sector are provided, such as number of SMEs and employment creation. They also underline that Member States have undertaken many relevant policy actions, but much more needs to be done to ensure that the guidelines set by the Small Business Act (SBA) are fully implemented.