Criteria For The Labelling Of Smes

There is a reason the term “small business” is vague; it reflects the lack of a generally accepted definition. The U.S. Small Business Administration (SBA) has established numerical definitions of small businesses. These size standards vary to reflect industry

This was just a definition on the basis of how many employees are present in the company. When looking at different countries and industries, the employees can range from 50 in Australia till 500 employees. Other factors that determine whether a business is small or not are net profits, assets or sales. There are many benefits of owning a small business but then again there are disadvantages as well. The business can be initiated with a small initial capital and can be advertised in any manner. The person is her or her own boss and there are no

* Small and Medium Sized Enterprise - A company with 500 or fewer employees. They tend to have limited managerial and other resources and primarily use exporting to expand internationally.

A small business is one that mainly has an independent ownership and operation. Its operation is organized for profit and has no dominant field. The number of employees in a small business depends on industry or rather its operation and standards size of its eligibility. A small business can have all levels of operations just as a large scale firm can hold (Stanberry, 2009). The only difference between the two is the number of employees, the annual receipts and the construction. For instance, the number of

Small medium sized enterprises and small and medium sized businesses are often referred to as SMEs. These are companies whose number of employees or turnover falls underneath certain limits. The EU defines companies with fewer than 50 employees as small, and those

In 2014 SMEs account for 99.3% of firms (4.8 million companies), 47.8% of employment (15.2 million people) and 33.2% of annual turnover (£1.6 Billion)6. The European Commission SME Performance Review provides estimates for the EU private sector. In 2014 SMEs account for 99.8% of firms (21.6 million companies), 67.5% of employment (88.8 million people) and 58.4% of annual turnover (€3.6 Trillion)9.

The decree also specified that the definition of what signifies a “small business” should vary from industry to industry to reflect industry differences. The act also instructed the SBA to create small business size standards on an industry-by-industry basis. This statistical description is what is universally considered the standard for determining whether a business is considered “small” or “large”. Also, the act specified that to be considered a small business, the company must be independently owned and operated and not principal in its area of operation.

Christodoulou, M 2009, ‘How big is an SME? Confusion over size could complicate international rules’,

There is no single definition for small business an earlier attempt was given by Bolton Report (1971). Which suggests two definitions of small business. Firstly, he says a business is small if it meets three criteria’s:

Size can be measured in many ways, for example, the numbers of staff, number of branches sales revenue each year, number of customers and market share. So there are large, medium and small businesses.

The number of SMEs in India is around 40 million per the published statistics in 2013. Moreover, around 6,000 different products (both traditional and hi-tech products) are offered by SMEs in India (Kumar 2013). According to Goyal (2013), even though SMEs contribute only around 17% to GDP growth, it gives employment to 40% of India’s workforce. While encouraging big companies, cities like Detroit failed to recognize the importance of the SME

The outline of this chapter is as follows: the background of this study is first explained; the justification for and relevance of this study to SME’s in Ghana follows; the underlying key concepts of the research conducted study are presented as the research problems; the research objectives, research questions and the research limitations are all elaborated on; and then, the structure of the thesis is outlined.

SME is an acronym of Small – Medium Enterprises. An enterprises size is defined, in EU Law, by its number of employees and either the turnover or balance sheet total. A small enterprise has 50 employees or fewer and a turnover of € 10 million or less or a balance sheet total of € 10 m or less. A medium organisation has 250 employees or less and a turnover of € 50 million or less with a balance sheet total of

In his book (Prasad C. S., 2004) has predicted the vision of SMEs up to 2012, regarding the employment generation and open economic development of trade from India. The author explained that due to Liberalization, Globalization and WTO a rethinking is being made to analyse the targets before the SMEs sector. The author suggested that with the inherent advantage of flexibility and innovativeness of the sector, the major constraints of economies of scale could be met by adopting the cluster development and formulation of appropriate policies. The book is based on the compilation of the various articles of the author published in different journals on the theme of WTO and SMEs, SMEs financing, SMEs policy, Employment Generation in SMEs and Export potential and cluster development among SMEs etc.

The importance of small and Micro Enterprises (SMEs) in the economy of any country cannot be overlooked. In fact for nearly 15 years, most researchers dealing with economic planning have highlighted the significance of these enterprises stating that they are a key player in realizing any country’s economic goals. As such, governments as well as other organizations with interest in development are laying plans and strategies to promote the establishment of Small and Micro Enterprises. This is seen as a move to ensure that there is full participation of SMEs in the country’s economy. The Small and Micro Enterprises have been known to contribute to a large extend as a source of innovation, entrepreneurial skills as well as source of employment. For example, statistics in 25countries of the European Union show that 99% of the jobs provided to its citizens come from the micro, small and medium-sized enterprises. Rowe (2008) points out that the British economy relies heavily on the participation of SMEs. On the other hand, 99% of the UK’s economy is composed of small and micro enterprises.