[pp.int.general] Towards a Pirate Policy on Environmental Issues

Mon Aug 6 12:00:05 CEST 2012

Dear Amelia,

Sorry for the late reply. These days I spend most of the time in a partial
state of internet isolation...
I think most EU members are using the same criteria to evaluate the size of
companies in official statistics. Using such criteria, a company with 249
or less employees is counted as medium sized or small not only by the
Eurostat Structural Business Statistical database (which I am sure you know
far better than me) but also by the state members' bureaus of statistics.
So even when the may feel that the requirements for being considered a "big
firm" have been settled a little bit too low, at least we can feel
comfortable considering that we are comparing comparanda (of course if we
are willing to rise the bar of how many workers define a "large business"
from 250 to something like 300 or so, the impact of SMEs in job creation
will grow too.)

I had the opportunity to take a look at some official documents, and I
think they support my view that the main creators of jobs in the private
sector in the EU are small and medium bussiness, not the large ones.
In a report for the European Commission by Paul Wymenga, Viera Spanikova,
James Derbyshire, and A. Barker "Are EU SMEs recovering from the crisis?
Annual Report on EU Small and Medium sized Enterprises 2010/2011"
Rotterdam, Cambridge, 2011 (URL missing now, sorry) the authors (citing
Eurostat Structural Business Statistical database, which is contains data
up to 2007, updated by the authors up to 2010) by 2010 small and medium
enterprises accounted for the 66,9% of the jobs in the EU area, that is,
slightly more than 2/3 of the total [note: I think this figures are
relative to the *public* sector, not to the whole workforce). The figures
are only slightly lower for Spain, where SMEs account for 63,9% of the jobs
in 2011, according to the Directorio Central de Empresas.

I'll be eagerly waiting the results of your report.

Best wishes,

Daniel

2012/8/3 Amelia Andersdotter <teirdes at gmail.com>

>  Dear Daniel,
>
> A large company is any company with more than 250 employees, so this
> category includes many more companies than the top 50 list. Companies with
> less than 250 employees are medium-sized or small. The limit for a
> microsmal enterprise is at 10 employees or less. Of course, we can argue
> about whether these limit is good, or arbitrary - in many situations I feel
> a more adequate measure of company size is turnover, also because this
> measure more adequately describes the relative influence of the company on
> the economy and therefore also the politics. It is anyway an established
> measure somewhere, since 2003, also by the EUropean Commission and in a
> European context. The exact investigation establishing these limits evade
> me at this time, and I apologize for this.
>
> It may be that you wish to re-evaluate your position based on this, or
> not. If not, then it would be very useful if part of your re-evaluation
> included the assessment of turnover in terms of size and economic impact of
> a company on society in the data aggregation and processing industries. It
> will be very helpful to my work in the European Parliament on the Data
> Protection Regulation. However, I will need, in order for it to have impact
> on my work, for it to be based on other things than assumptions and
> speculation, because unfortunately this is one of the methods most commonly
> applied to weed out random opinionation from careful after-thought in my
> day-to-day work environment.
>
> Looking forward to our future correspondance,
>
> best regards,
>
> Amelia
>
>
> On 01.08.2012 12:38, Daniel Riaño wrote:
>
> Thanks for your answer, Amelia. It may be the case that your source was
> biased and the people who produced the report was trying to spread the
> feeling that large corporations are collectively providing the majority of
> the jobs worldwide. But I don't think this is so (it is certainly not so in
> Spain, where SMEs are, by large, the responsibles of the majority of jobs,
> and they depend crucially in new information technologies for their
> survival.)
>
> The largest employer in the world, by far, is Wall-Mart [I'm using Fortune
> Magazine data here, and I am making calculations using an estimation of a
> labour force worldwide of about 3.230 million people for a population of
> 7.000 million people]. WallMart employs (some would say that's only a way
> of speaking) 2.200.000 workers. That's a huge number, but it's only a 0,07%
> of the labour force worldwide. The next largest employer (China national
> petroleum) employs just 1.700.000 workers (ca. 0,05 of labour force
> worldwide) . The 50th largest corporation by number of employees is
> Berkshire (270K employees, a 0,008% of the total). The biggest corporation
> by revenue in 2011 (Royal Dutch Shell) employs 90K people (about the same
> as the second largest), that is a 0,002%.
>
>
>
>
>
> 2012/8/1 Amelia Andersdotter <teirdes at gmail.com>
>
>>  Pe 01.08.2012 02:52, Daniel Riaño a scris:
>>
>> 2012/7/29 Amelia Andersdotter <teirdes at gmail.com>
>>
>>> More than 90% of all Europeans are employed by medium- to big-sized
>>> corporations.
>>>
>>
>> this is absolute news to me. Can you give a hint to the source of your
>> data?
>>
>>
>>  I suppose I have read it in a Commission study somewhere. I was also
>> surprised when I read it since the general buzz is that Europe is endowed
>> with exceptionally many SMEs (about 90% of all our enterprises are SMEs).
>> It is not my area of expertise so I can't easily relocate the same study -
>> I hope you provide me with leniency for this.
>>
>> However, it also makes sense, since medium-sized and larger companies
>> employ more people - otherwise they would by definition not be medium-sized
>> or larger companies, since the criteria normally used for defining such
>> companies in the type of study relevant to cite such numbers is by number
>> of employees, rather than by turn-over (which personally, I would find to
>> be a better and more adequate measure of company size any day).
>>
>> best regards,
>>
>> Amelia
>>
>>
>>
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