Micro-Enterprises Employ Nearly Half of Slovakia's Business Workforce and Under a Fifth of Germany's

Counting the people, not the firms

Almost every enterprise in Europe is small: the vast majority of firms in any Member State employ fewer than ten people. Counted that way the Union looks uniform. Counted by where people work, it does not.

Eurostat's structural business statistics report, for each size class of enterprise, how many people are employed in it. Dividing the micro-enterprise figure by the total for the business economy gives the share of a country's business workforce that works in firms with fewer than ten people. That share, computed here from the two published counts, runs from 16.3% to 46.4% across the Union.

Where the workforce is in small firms

Slovakia records 46.4%, Greece 44.1%, Portugal 42.2% and Estonia 41.1%: four Member States where more than two fifths of business-economy employment is in micro-enterprises. Italy at 39.9%, Cyprus and Hungary at 39.1%, Poland at 37.7% and Slovenia at 37.0% follow.

Eighteen Member States are at or above 30%. The group spans the Mediterranean, most of central and eastern Europe and the Baltic states, and it contains countries at very different income levels: Italy and Slovenia alongside Bulgaria and Romania.

Where it is in large ones

Luxembourg at 16.3%, Germany at 18.7% and Denmark at 19.3% are the three Member States below 20%. Finland at 23.1%, Sweden at 24.7%, Ireland at 26.5% and France at 26.7% come next, then Austria and the Netherlands at 28.3%.

The other end of the size distribution tells the same story from the opposite side. Enterprises with 250 or more persons employed account for 46.1% of France's business-economy workforce, 44.5% of Germany's, 43.5% of Sweden's and 40.8% of the Netherlands'. In Greece the figure is 17.4%, in Cyprus 18.2%, in Estonia 18.4%. Portugal publishes no count for its largest firms, so its share cannot be derived.

Germany and Greece are the clearest pair. In Germany, large enterprises employ more than twice as many people as micro-enterprises; in Greece, micro-enterprises employ more than twice as many as large ones.

Three people, or twelve

Eurostat also publishes the average number of persons employed per enterprise, rounded to whole numbers. Germany records 12, Luxembourg 8, and Austria, Denmark and Ireland 6. Czechia, Estonia, Portugal and Slovakia record 3, and most of the Union sits at 4 or 5.

The average is pulled down by the sheer number of one-person firms, which is why the employment share is the better guide to where work happens. But the two measures agree on the ordering: the countries where the typical firm is smallest are the countries where the most people work in small firms.

What the size of a firm does not decide

Firm size is not a verdict on an economy. Micro-enterprises include the self-employed professional, the family restaurant and the software start-up alike, and a large share of them can reflect a strong service sector, a tradition of independent trades, or a shortage of the mid-sized firms that grow into large ones. The countries with the most employment in large enterprises are also the countries with the largest manufacturing groups, and much of the difference in this ranking is the difference between economies built around industrial firms and economies built around shops, services and trades.