OECD SME and Entrepreneurship Outlook 2019
The new OECD SME and Entrepreneurship Outlook presents the latest trends in performance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and provides a comprehensive overview of business conditions and policy frameworks for SMEs and entrepreneurs.
This year’s edition provides comparative evidence on business dynamism, productivity growth, wage gaps and export trends by firm size across OECD countries and emerging economies. It explores the implications of digitalisation and globalisation for market conditions and SME access to strategic resources such as finance, skills, technology, data and other innovation assets. The report gives comparative analysis of regulatory frameworks and policies to enhance contributions by SMEs and entrepreneurs, and delivers a forward-looking perspective on the opportunities and challenges SMEs and entrepreneurs face in doing business and scaling up their activities. It also contains country profiles outlining the latest developments in national SME performance and business conditions, with expanded country profiles available on line.
Also available in: French
Estonia
In Estonia, cost for starting a business and time to comply with taxes are among the most supportive in the EU. Estonia has made continued efforts at simplification and digitalisation over the past decade. The government is actively reducing administrative burden through its Zero-Bureaucracy project initiated in 2015. A notable new initiative is the introduction of an entrepreneurship account programme for individual entrepreneurs: revenues up to EUR 25 000 are taxed a flat 20% rate (and 40% above this threshold) without having to submit declarations. Another example is the Reporting 3.0 programme which will automate business reporting from 2018 onwards, transferring information directly from accounting software to tax and statistics services. The initiative is expected to reduce accounting time and costs of SMEs by up to 20%.