The purpose of this book is to support and encourage policy makers to develop reliable evaluations of the impact of SME and entrepreneurship policies and to make use of impact evaluation results in policy design and implementation. The book argues that systematic and reliable evaluation is vital for justifying the use of public resources for SME and entrepreneurship support and for steering those resources to the policy measures that deliver the greatest benefits against government objectives. It offers government policy makers guidance in making the case for evaluation, commissioning evaluations that will be reliable and learning from existing and new evaluations.

Part I of this Framework provides information for readers seeking high-level guidance on the principles of conducting reliable impact evaluation. Of particular importance is the Six Steps to Heaven tool, which identifies progressively more reliable levels of evaluation based on features of the treatment-control group match.

Government accountability bodies in various OECD countries point to a dearth of reliable evidence on the impacts of SME and entrepreneurship policy. Either evaluations have not been undertaken or their methodologies have not been of high enough standard. However, SME and entrepreneurship policy is a youthful field where questions are raised about likely effectiveness, to do for example with low survivability of start-ups and low motivations for SME growth.