ABSTRACT
Commonly (although the United Kingdom is an exception), statistics on small business exclude agriculture and also forestry and fishing. Thus data published by the European Commission relate to ‘non-primary private enterprises’ and the US data to ‘non-farm businesses’. The Official Small and Medium Enterprise Agency (part of MITI) also does not cover the primary sector in Japan. The reason for the exclusion of agriculture is probably that historically powerful Ministries of Agriculture collected their own statistics and had their own policies for farmers. Nonetheless, most farms are small businesses and increasingly share the characteristics of other SMEs. In many developing countries, most statistics may exclude subsistence farmers participating in the market economy to only a limited extent.
