The Importance of High Growth Enterprises (HGEs)

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Definition of High Growth Enterprises

In order to perform any empirical research on the effect high growth businesses have on the economy, clear guidelines have to be established to categorise and identify them. The most widely used and accepted guideline is the OECD definition of high-growth firms. The OECD suggest to use two performance indicators, the employment size and the turnover. Enterprises are classified in the high growth sector if their average annualised growth is larger than 20% per year over a 3 year period, ideally in both previously introduced indicators (OECD, 2007, Ch 8). Additionally a size threshold of 10 is applied to the employment measure to exclude 100% growth rates of companies that grow from one to two employees.

This classification leaves blind spots excluding businesses existing less than 3 years. Furthermore it has a three year reaction period until new data is included in the data set but thereby any unprofitable short term businesses are automatically excluded.

Overview of the Business Environment

By applying the previously discussed classification technique the effect different business types have on the economy can be empirically examined. Literature suggests that high growth businesses are not only found in the environment of recently founded businesses, but can be found in all stages of firm age (Anyadike-Danes et al., 2009).

In this paper however we focus mainly on newly created enterprises, since this is the sector that is most sensitive to external influences and support e.g. through policy changes. New companies existing for less than 5 years that classify as HGEs are referred to as ‘gazelles’ (OECD, 2010, page 16) and have proven to be major employment generators (Henrekson &...

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