Las Empresas Familiares en el Ecuador: Definición y aplicación metodológica

Family businesses (FB) are the oldest structure of humanity, representing a predominant role in the economy of each country. In Ecuador, the importance of FB is notorious; in 2016, family-owned companies contributed with 51% of GDP, however there is no standardized methodology to define whether a company is FBor not, in this sense, this research builds a methodology that differentiates companies according to its ownership structure, adding an index that determines the degree of power that the family has over the company. We foundthat approximately 86% of the companies are family members, while 14% correspond to companies of non-family structure. Our results are robust according to several scenarios proposed for small, medium and large companies that include different percentages used for the definition of FB, because we show that an increase of 10 percentage points over 20% of the initial methodological definition, demonstrates that only 4,49% of the total companies analyzed become NFB. Finally, we show that 63,2% of the FBin Ecuador have a high decision power indicator; of this total, large family businesses have 69,3% with a high level of family involvement, while on the other hand, in the case of microenterprises, this proportion corresponds to only 59,8%. The proposed methodology is expected to be a tool to standardize the variable of classification of companies in family and non-family ata national level and provide data for the development of future research agendas, which provide analyzes supported by empirical evidence