Monitoring SMEs' Performance in Europe : methodological assessment of the SBA Scoreboard 2021

The European Commission's Directorate-General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs (DG GROW), with the scientific support by the European Commission's Joint Research Centre (JRC), assesses the Performance of Small and Medium Enterprises in Europe. We study performance in eleven principles: (1) Entrepreneurship, (2) 'Second chance', (3) 'Think small first' and 'Responsive administration', (4) State aid & public procurement, (5) Access to finance, (6) Single market, (7) Skills and innovation, (8) Environment, (9) Internationalization and (10) Digitalization. This JRC technical report describes the underlying rationale for the quantitative measurement of these principles. It discusses the methodological approach to calculate how countries perform in the outlined principles. This takes into account the choice of the indicators, the data quality controls (including missing data and outliers), normalization and weightings, and the statistical coherence and robustness checks of the SBA 2021 edition