Talk:Small and medium enterprises

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[edit] Origin

er.. Im going to have to say that this term was originally developed by the Canadian Government.. but I guess this isnt a history page.

Get a source on that and add it in, it's an interesting tidbit :) Shanada 08:51, 18 August 2006 (UTC)

[edit] US Small Business size

The US does maintain legal definitions for what constitutes a small business; the Small Business Administration maintains a web site, and the URL http://www.sba.gov/size/indexguide.html does provide some information, based on employee count and annual receipts.

The key difference vis-a-vis the EU seems to be that the US government maintains different size standards on a per-industry basis, so that the small businesses are defined as small in their class. Some industries are naturally more employee-intensive.

[edit] move to small and medium-sized enterprises

I have edited the page to include the normal, well-established[1], and much more common expression small and medium-sized enterprises and the very common small and medium-sized businesses at the beginning of the article in accordance with WP naming conventions. Edit: I now realised that the expression is actually a bit illogical and much less common in the singular, so it seems the article should be moved to small and medium enterprises or the much more common small and medium-sized enterprises. I added the search results for the plural expressions:

Google: 243,000 for "small and medium-sized enterprise, 546,000 for "small and medium-sized business, 528 for site:edu "small and medium-sized enterprise, 931 for site:edu "small and medium-sized business, 21,900 for site:uk "small and medium-sized enterprise, 32,100 for site:uk "small and medium-sized business, 1,640,000 for site:uk "small and medium enterprise, 30,600 for site:uk "small and medium business, 630 for site:edu "small and medium enterprise, 800 for site:edu "small and medium business.

2,190,000 for "small and medium-sized enterprises, 2,130,000 for "small and medium-sized businesses, 31,500 for site:edu "small and medium-sized enterprises, 22,800 for site:edu "small and medium-sized businesses, 259,000 for site:uk "small and medium-sized enterprises, 259,000 for site:uk "small and medium-sized businesses, 134,000 for site:uk "small and medium enterprises, 86,600 for site:uk "small and medium businesses, 25,800 for site:edu "small and medium enterprises, 1,260 for site:edu "small and medium businesses --Espoo 09:15, 19 September 2007 (UTC)