In 2014, looking at the EU level, three quarters (75.5 %) of all active in the business economy enterprises (NACE Rev. 2 Sections B to N, excluding K64.2) were within the services sector, providing work for 67.1 % of the total number of persons employed. Services accounted for between 63.8 % of the number of all enterprises in the business economy in Slovakia and 85.7 % of the total in Luxembourg. In terms of its contribution to employment, the services sector accounted for 53.7 % of the workforce in Czech Republic, while the United Kingdom had the highest share - 78.8 %, recently published Eurostat data show.

Looking at the trend of preliminary death rates in 2014 compared to the final ones in 2013, (although in many countries only provisional, due to impossible checks of reactivations at the time of reporting the data), an average decrease of 2.8 % was to be expected. Enterprise death rate was likely to decline in half of the Member States; this fall was most significant in Latvia, Romania Slovakia and Malta. Although the situation was set to remain fairly stable in Cyprus, Finland, Poland and Luxembourg, the enterprise death rate was expected to increase with more than 8 % in Denmark, Croatia and the Czech Republic, with the biggest rise in Bulgaria and Lithuania.

The five-year survival rate of enterprises born in 2009 and still active in 2014 shows that less than half (44 %) of them survive for a five-year period. Given that the survival rates logically decrease over 5 years in all countries for which data were available, it is still interesting to look at the employment changes in a five-year time frame. Only in nine countries (Belgium, Lithuania, Estonia, Romania, Luxembourg, Denmark, the Netherlands, Finland and Norway) employment in those enterprises that survived for five years increased. The largest decrease was noted in Spain followed by Italy, Austria and Czech Republic. Read more (in English).