Analysis of EU Member States’ strengths and weaknesses in the 2016 SMEs scoreboard

The European Commission’s Directorate-General for Internal Market, Industry, Entrepreneurship and SMEs (DG GROW), with the scientific support by the European Commission Joint Research Centre (JRC), assesses the Performance of Small and Medium Enterprises in Europe, depending on the performance in the ten principles of: (1) Entrepreneurship, (2) ‘Second chance’, (3) ‘Think small first’, (4) ‘Responsive administration’, (5) State aid & public procurement, (6) Access to finance, (7) Single market, (8) Skills and innovation, (9) Environment, and (10) Internationalisation. This JRC technical report adopts a robust consensus clustering methodology to group European countries in 5 robust Clusters, based on similar performance in these principles. Then, Cluster average values are exploited to analyse strengths and weaknesses of European countries within the Small Business Act principle and to derive a prioritization setting as well as a benchmarking tool to guide European Member States in improving along the ten principles.