Dear Amelia,<br><br>Sorry for the late reply. These days I spend most of the time in a partial state of internet isolation...<br>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.)<br><br>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. <br>
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. <br>
<br>I'll be eagerly waiting the results of your report.<br><br>Best wishes,<br><br>Daniel<br>
<br><br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2012/8/3 Amelia Andersdotter <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:teirdes@gmail.com" target="_blank">teirdes@gmail.com</a>></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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<div>Dear Daniel,<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
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.<br>
<br>
Looking forward to our future correspondance,<br>
<br>
best regards,<br>
<br>
Amelia<div><div><br>
<br>
On 01.08.2012 12:38, Daniel Riaņo wrote:<br>
</div></div></div><div><div>
<blockquote type="cite">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.)<br>
<br>
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%.<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<br>
<div class="gmail_quote">2012/8/1 Amelia Andersdotter <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:teirdes@gmail.com" target="_blank">teirdes@gmail.com</a>></span><br>
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
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<div>Pe 01.08.2012 02:52, Daniel Riaņo a scris:<br>
</div>
<div>
<blockquote type="cite">2012/7/29 Amelia Andersdotter <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:teirdes@gmail.com" target="_blank">teirdes@gmail.com</a>></span><br>
<div class="gmail_quote">
<blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">
More than 90% of all Europeans are employed by
medium- to big-sized corporations.<br>
</blockquote>
<div><br>
this is absolute news to me. Can you give a hint to
the source of your data? <br>
</div>
</div>
<br>
</blockquote>
<br>
</div>
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. <br>
<br>
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). <br>
<div> <br>
best regards,<br>
<br>
Amelia<br>
<br>
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