SEI — Social Entrepreneurship Index
Social Entrepreneurship Index · SEI 2026Methodology
Methodology note · SEI 2026 provisional edition · v0.9

Social Entrepreneurship Index 2026: how the provisional SEI Diamond is built

How 40 indicators from public statistics, published indices and coded policy documents become comparable scores for 45 European countries, and how far those scores can be trusted.

Authors Social Entrepreneurship Observatory, SENICVersion 0.9.4DOI assigned on depositPrint or save as PDF

1 · What the index measures

The Social Entrepreneurship Index (SEI) measures the conditions a country offers social enterprises, not the size or performance of the social-enterprise sector itself. It asks whether the political, economic, legal, institutional and financial environment makes it easier or harder to start, run and grow an enterprise with a primary social or environmental mission.

The framework is the SEI Diamond. The political dimension sits at the centre as a circle, because political stability and political will condition everything else. The four corners are the economic, legal, institutional and financial environments. A larger, more even Diamond means a more supportive ecosystem; a lopsided one shows where a country is strong and where it is holding social enterprises back.

Figure 1. The SEI Diamond, illustrated with the 45-country average (green) and the EU-27 average (dashed). The political dimension is drawn as the radius of the central circle; each corner is a dimension score on a 0–100 scale.

The index was designed in a doctoral study of the conditions for social entrepreneurship in North Macedonia (Chichevaliev, 2020), which built on an earlier analysis of the same conditions (Chichevaliev, 2019) and proposed the five dimensions, their sub-dimensions and an indicator matrix, with the Diamond as the way of showing them. It was first applied to North Macedonia, with survey data, in 2020, and its framing was extended to the Western Balkans in Chichevaliev et al. (2023). Its premise is that social entrepreneurship depends on its environment as much as on the entrepreneur: on the ecosystem of resource providers, partners, markets and rules around an enterprise (Bloom & Dees, 2008; Isenberg, 2010), and on formal institutions, which can support social enterprises or leave voids that they step in to fill (Dacin et al., 2010; Mair & Martí, 2009; Scott, 1995; Stephan et al., 2015). Cross-country studies find that political, economic and institutional conditions shape how much social entrepreneurship a country has (Estrin et al., 2013; Griffiths et al., 2013; Hoogendoorn, 2016).

Each dimension follows a strand of that literature. The political dimension combines political stability with political will, expressed in strategies and in the structures that carry them. The economic dimension covers social need (poverty, inequality, joblessness), business dynamics and access to markets. The legal dimension asks whether social enterprises are defined and recognised in law, which European countries do in very different ways (Defourny & Nyssens, 2010; Fici, 2016), and how heavy the general regulatory and judicial environment is. The institutional dimension covers the quality of public institutions, education and support structures. The financial dimension covers the sources of funding open to social enterprises and access to them, a constraint the literature treats as specific to enterprises that pursue a social mission (Austin et al., 2006). The composite is built following the OECD and Joint Research Centre handbook on composite indicators (OECD et al., 2008).

The full matrix has 63 indicators: 8 political, 20 economic, 12 legal, 16 institutional and 7 financial, grouped into sub-dimensions. They draw on three kinds of evidence: public statistics and published indices; a review of laws, strategies and programmes; and a survey of social entrepreneurs and ecosystem experts. This edition uses the first two. It scores the 40 indicators that can be filled for all 45 countries today; the 23 survey-based indicators complete the index once fieldwork is done.

2 · Countries and reference periods

The index covers 45 countries in five groups: the EU-27, the Western Balkans (Albania, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Kosovo, Montenegro, North Macedonia, Serbia), the Eastern Partnership (Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Georgia, Moldova, Ukraine), EFTA (Iceland, Liechtenstein, Norway, Switzerland) and the UK and Turkey. Regional figures are unweighted means of member countries.

Statistics use the latest year available, mostly 2024 or 2025. This edition takes each country’s most recent observation whatever its age, so a few values date from 2014 to 2018 (some GEM surveys, NEET for Ukraine, the UK’s statistics after it left EU-SILC); the year of every value is in the data, and version 1.0 will apply a maximum age. The policy layer describes the situation at end-2025. A few sources exist for one year only and are used as published: the Heritage Index of Economic Freedom 2020, the World Economic Forum Global Competitiveness Report 2019 (its last edition), the ease-of-getting-credit measure carried in the Global Innovation Index 2020, and the Open Budget Survey 2023.

3 · Indicators and sources

Table 1 lists every row of the SEI indicator register: the 40 live indicators with their sources, and the indicators still pending. Some pending rows group several survey indicators, which is why the register has fewer rows than the matrix has indicators. Full references for the data sources are listed at the end of this note (Cornell University et al., 2020; Eurostat, 2024a, 2024b, 2026a–2026g; Freedom House, 2025; Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, 2026; International Budget Partnership, 2024; Schwab, 2019; The Heritage Foundation, 2020; World Bank, 2026a, 2026b). The governance indicators are described in Kaufmann et al. (2011) and, for the 2025 revision used here, in Kaufmann and Kraay (2024).

4 · From raw values to scores

Every indicator is turned into a score from 0 (least favourable) to 100 (most favourable), in one of three ways.

score = 100 × (x − p5) / (p95 − p5), capped to [0, 100] score = 100 − score where lower values are better

Percentile goalposts keep a single outlier from compressing everyone else. Because they are set on the whole panel, they stay fixed when the index is recomputed for earlier years, so a change in score reflects a change in the underlying value. Table 2 gives the goalposts.

5 · Aggregation

Scores are averaged in three steps, each an unweighted arithmetic mean: indicators into sub-dimensions, sub-dimensions into dimensions, and the five dimensions into the composite. Each sub-dimension therefore carries equal weight within its dimension, whatever its number of indicators, and each dimension carries a fifth of the composite.

Two indicators combine sources. Where a country has no AROPE figure, indicator 2.1.2 uses the income-only at-risk-of-poverty rate. Indicators 4.2.3 (investment and property protection) and 5.2.3 (SME financing and financial freedom) average two sources. A missing indicator is left out of its sub-dimension’s average rather than imputed, and the number of indicators behind each dimension is reported with every score.

The composite is the mean of the five dimensions; the political dimension is not double-counted for being drawn at the centre of the Diamond. A country scores well only by doing well across the board: a high score on one dimension can offset a low one, but the profile still shows the gap.

6 · The policy layer

Eight indicators come from coding laws, strategies, programmes and procurement rules, with 31 December 2025 as the reference date. From version 0.9.3 each indicator is coded on a set of criteria, two to five per indicator and per country in all. Each criterion is a factual question answered on four levels, 0, 33, 67 or 100, and each level has a written description (Table 3). The indicator score is the mean of its criteria. Scoring explicit questions on four described levels follows the Open Budget Survey (International Budget Partnership, 2024), whose answers are also scored 0, 33, 67 or 100. Earlier versions gave each indicator a single code with two to four levels; criteria make the steps between scores smaller and let each answer be checked on its own.

The law indicator (3.2.1) records five facts: the adoption stage of the law (none, bill, enacted or in force: 0, 33, 67 or 100) and, on a scale of 0, 50 or 100, its scope, its implementing rules, the status or register it creates and the bodies it provides for. A law that is not yet in force scores 0 on the last three. Beside the score, the explorer shows a headline level from 0 to 3: 0 no law; 1 a bill, a law enacted but not in force, or a law in force with nothing implemented; 2 in force and partly implemented; 3 in force and fully implemented. A law for a single type of social enterprise, such as social cooperatives or work-integration enterprises, is capped at level 2. The index uses the score from the five facts; the level is a reading aid.

General rules settle borderline cases. Only adopted instruments count, except where a level names a draft or bill, and then only if it was pending on 31 December 2025; a body or measure that appears only in a draft does not count as provided for. Where an instrument does not exist, the criteria that describe it score 0. A strategy or action plan approved by a ministry or a programme body, rather than by the government, counts as adopted and is marked in the evidence as sectoral or programmatic adoption. A broader strategy reaches the second-highest level of dedication only with an SE objective, section or several SE measures; a single measure counts as a mention. Where no national strategy was adopted, adopted regional strategies count at that level, and the remaining strategy criteria describe the regional strategy documented. Where the codebook left the reading of a document open, the authors ruled; those answers are marked as author rulings in the evidence. Disability-employment regimes (sheltered workshops, protective or integrative companies) are not counted as social-enterprise law or policy unless the law calls them social enterprises. A social-enterprise status placed in another act, or a single legal form open to any purpose, counts as general in scope. Where competence is regional by constitution, regional frameworks stand in for national ones: the regions in Belgium, and the two entities and Brčko District in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A procurement law that transposes Article 77 of Directive 2014/24/EU, which lets contracting authorities reserve certain health, social and cultural service contracts for organisations with a public-service mission, reinvested profits and participatory ownership, reaches the top level of the legal basis for social clauses (2.3.2), as does an equivalent national provision reserving such contracts for non-profit or social-economy organisations (Georgia, Norway). EFTA countries and the UK score 0 on EU funds (5.1.1), as in earlier versions (section 10).

Every answer states the fact, the level description applied and the public source it rests on, so each can be checked on its own: under each country in the explorer, and in the policy-criteria file of the open dataset. Sources are official texts and pages first, then public reviews such as the European Commission’s Social Economy Gateway country pages, the OECD country fact sheets and notes (OECD & European Union, 2025) and the European mapping of social-enterprise ecosystems (Borzaga et al., 2020). The codes of version 0.9.2 and their sources served as leads. For the EU member states those codes had started from the national country reports prepared in 2025 for the mid-term review of the EU Social Economy Action Plan; the reports are not public (the Commission’s review itself is: European Commission, 2026), and no answer rests on them.

7 · The Diamond over time

Change over time is therefore a statement about governance, social and labour-market conditions, firm demography and early-stage entrepreneurship. It says nothing yet about how SE policy, the legal environment or access to finance have moved.

8 · Weighting sensitivity

Equal weights are a choice, and the policy layer is the part of the index most open to dispute: it is coded from documents, it records what exists on paper rather than how well it works, and in some sub-dimensions it is the only evidence. Five of the 15 scored sub-dimensions consist only of policy codes, so the eight policy indicators, a fifth of the 40, carry about 43% of the composite weight in the median country (70% in Liechtenstein). We therefore recompute the index under two alternatives.

9 · Provisional status and the field survey

Of the 23 pending indicators, three (legal forms, the pertinence of legislation and administrative procedures) need a further legal review; the other 20 cover what only social entrepreneurs and ecosystem experts can report: perceived political risks, access to public markets and tender support, staff and skills, experience of regulation, training and mentoring, sources and dependency of funding. The questionnaire is drafted. Until it is fielded, the provisional Diamond leans on general conditions and on the formal policy framework, and should be read as a first approximation.

10 · Limitations

11 · Data, citation and versions

All scores, raw values, policy codes, time series and the sensitivity results are published as an open dataset (CSV and JSON, with a Frictionless data package) on the data page, under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 licence for the SEI’s own scores and codes. Third-party values remain under their providers’ terms.

Version history

0.9.2 (4 November 2026) — public sources for every policy code. Each of the 208 EU codes is now documented with public documents, so none rests on the non-public SEAP country reports alone; 24 codes received their first public source. Five codes that the public record contradicted were corrected by author ruling (section 6). The composites of Germany (65.3 to 70.3), Italy (52.1 to 62.9) and Hungary (47.2 to 50.5) change; no other country’s score changes, though some ranks move by one place. Section 1 adds the origins and conceptual basis of the index, with references. The explorer interface is also available in Spanish, French and Italian.

0.9.1 (3 November 2026) — corrections after a full check of every value against its source and of every policy code. Gini: Eurostat series for Albania and Montenegro (previously World Bank estimates) and 2025 values added. Youth unemployment for Bosnia and Herzegovina: Eurostat from 2021 (previously ILO modelled estimates). Three-year survival rates for 2021–2023 added for Finland, Iceland and Turkey. Ease of getting credit: Global Innovation Index 2020 values (nine countries had carried the 2019 edition’s values). Insolvency framework: the two WEF 2019 scores averaged before rounding (seven countries change by 0.1). Freedom House rescaling: halves rounded up. Provisional flags added for Lithuania. Policy codes: six corrected and seven settled by author ruling (section 6); each EU code now links to the documents its country report cites. Spearman’s ρ now allows for tied ranks. Section 4 now states correctly that goalposts are percentiles of the whole panel. The largest changes in the composite are Montenegro (39.8 to 52.5), Moldova (56.8 to 49.3), Armenia (46.0 to 39.3), Ukraine (44.1 to 39.1), Georgia (43.0 to 38.0), Italy (55.3 to 52.1), Bosnia and Herzegovina (49.8 to 47.0), Germany (67.8 to 65.3) and the Netherlands (59.7 to 62.2).

0.9.0 (November 2026) — first public provisional edition: 45 countries, 40 live indicators, Diamond over time 2015–2024, weighting sensitivity. 1.0 (planned, SECon 2027, Skopje) — SEI 2026 with field-survey indicators for the pilot countries.

References

APA 7th edition. Data sets are listed with the release used; values were last checked against each source on 3 November 2026.

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