How does Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) understand startup activity?

－Introduction to Global Entrepreneurship Monitor－

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to introduce how Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) captures the startups activity and some results of 2008 survey. In Japan we usually use Establishment and Enterprise Census by Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications in order to measure startup activity. However, this statistics has a couple of problems to reach the goal. For example this census is conducted at intervals of 2 or 3 years.Therefore any enterprise that begins her operation and stops it in the interval could not be counted. Other statistics also have some weaknesses. At present no official statistics is designed to measure entrepreneurship in Japan although we need to come up with effective policies to stimulate entrepreneurship under this recession. The way to know startups activity with accuracy is the first challenge to establish entrepreneurial society. The major objectives of GEM is to measure differences in the level of entrepreneurial activity between countries, to probe for a systematic relationship between entrepreneurship and national economic growth, and to uncover factors that lead to higher levels of entrepreneurship. 2008 research is its 10th year of GEM project and Japan has participated in GEM from the beginning.