The goal of this project was to analyse the start-up activity in Germany in comparison with other countries. The aim of the analyses was to determine the development of the number of (opportunity-oriented) and the self-employed over time, the correlation between entrepreneurship and growth, the relationship between bureaucracy and entrepreneurship and the attitudes of the population towards entrepreneurship and technological developments include. To arrive at robust conclusions, an essential part of this project was to systematically evaluate the available international data sets. The records were analysed with respect to information content, comparability and consistency with each other and over time. The result has been that there is currently no data source covering the number of business start-ups, which allows reliable international comparisons.