Creation of preliminary framework for measuring the economic and social impact of employee-owned companies on the Scottish economy

1. a wide-ranging review of the empirical literature on employee-owned firms. It both provides details of major studies that have been conducted on a variety of topics and draws attention to methodological issues relating to data quality and availability and to the costs and benefits of various analytical approaches.

2. It undertakes an assessment of the data held by CDS, bearing in mind the type of evaluations that have been conducted in academic research to date.

3. It identifies a set of potential research questions, based on the literature to date. It considers methodological issues associated with these questions, and highlights the type of data that will be necessary for such questions to be empirically addressed.

4. It recommends an approach to future research in the Scottish employee-owned sector which explicitly takes into account methodological issues such as difficulties in securing relevant and high quality data.