Is the role of micro-enterprises, i.e. those that employ 0-9 people, in Poland greater or smaller than their role in other nations of the European Union?  How are Polish enterprises different from “EU” enterprises?  Ewa Balcerowicz seeks to answer these questions in her recently published article, “Micro-enterprises in Poland in the broader context of the European Union,” in the latest edition of the Report on the Condition of the Small and Medium-Sized Enterprise Sector in Poland in 2007- 2008. 

Twenty million enterprises make up the business activity in the industrial and service sectors in the 27 states of the European Union, of which 1.4 million are Polish firms.  Poland accounts for 7.2% of the registered, active enterprises within the European Union.  While collectively in the European Union, micro-enterprises account for 92%; in Poland the share is greater at 96%.  Similarly, the share of medium and large enterprises in Poland do not differ greatly from the EU average.  However, it is important to note that small enterprises, those that employ 10-49 people, are significantly under-represented compared to the EU average. 

Micro-enterprises are a greater source of employment in Poland than in the EU-27.  Within the EU workforce of 126.7 million, close to 37.5 million are employed by micro-enterprises, amounting to 30% of total employment.  In Poland employment by micro-enterprises is greater by 1/3, since the micro sector creates 40% of jobs in the economy.  This makes micro-enterprises the largest source of employment in Poland, followed by large enterprises which account for 30% of employment.  In the EU-27, these employment trends are reversed; large firms provide the largest source of employment, later to be followed by micro-enterprises. The differences in percentage of employment by large and micro-enterprises in the EU-27 is smaller than that in Poland. 

Although relative to the EU-27 as a whole, the micro-enterprises sector in Poland seems particularly strong, the share of micro-enterprises in four other EU nations is even greater; these include: Greece, where micro-enterprises employ 56% of the non-financial business sector, as well as Italy, Portugal and Cyprus.  The remaining EU states have micro-enterprise sectors significantly smaller than that of Poland.  In conclusion, the size of the micro-enterprise sector varies significantly throughout the member states; in Greece the role of micro-enterprise employment of the workforce is almost double that of the EU-27 average, while in Slovakia the micro-enterprise sector is the source for only 13% of employment, almost half of the EU average.  Thus the role of the Greek micro-enterprise sector is four times greater than the Slovak.