Best Practices for Defining and Measuring of Micro, Small, and Medium- Sized Enterprises

We offer best-practice recommendations for authors, journal reviewers and editors regarding the definition and measurement of micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs). MSMEs are a principal research topic and resource for governmental policy due to their substantial impact on job and wealth creation as well as their omnipresence, representing an estimated 99% of all businesses. Based on a systematic review of academic and non-academic literature relating to enterprise size we reveal challenges researchers face when studying MSME and resulting issues for defining and measuring MSMEs as a socially constructed phenomenon. The identified issues represent major barriers to comparing and/or aggregating research findings and thus building our knowledge base on MSME. Our recommendations address challenges applicable to researchers, practitioners, and policy makers, in addition to studies that examine this phenomenon across multiple countries and/or industries. The implementation of our recommendations will likely facilitate the aggregation of scholarly knowledge on MSME through increasing consistency and/or comparability of MSME measures. Also, journal editors and reviewers can use our recommendations to ascertain which measures are being used in a manuscript while serving as a developmental foundation to addressing new or potentially underdeveloped challenges with future research.