Business registers — Algeria (2015-2023)

The demography of Algerian businesses, half-year by half-year, 2015 to 2023. 22,362 observations: natural persons — sole traders — and legal entities, as a stock at the reporting date, and as registrations and deregistrations over the period.

This is the only source crossing economic activity with sex and age. Sole traders grow from 1,162,571 in 2016 to 2,451,550 in 2023 — more than double. But the share of women falls: 12.1% in 2016, 10.8% in 2023. The number of women entrepreneurs rises in absolute terms, from 140,494 to 263,743; their share does not.

On the legal-entity side, the stock grows from 161,943 in 2016 to 215,136 in the first half of 2022, broken down by legal form — EURL, SARL, SNC, SPA, cooperatives — and by ownership: domestic private, foreign private, joint venture, public, state enterprise.

Twelve crossings in all: wilaya against month, legal form, age bracket, ownership, activity sector and sex; and activity sector against age bracket and month.

Three quantities that the figures alone do not separate. Stock, registrations and deregistrations look alike, and the source publishes them side by side. A title naming a HALF-YEAR describes a flow, not a stock — one 2018 table does not say "registrations" and yet is exactly that: the next table, explicitly so titled, gives the same figures wilaya by wilaya. Taking it for a stock would show 5,361 legal entities in Algeria where there are two hundred thousand. The distinction ships in its own column.

The surest check is sex. Male plus female equals the total, on every row, and it rests on a different axis from the row sums: a reading shifted by one column breaks it without touching the other. Added to it are the total column — the one equal to the sum of the others on every row — and the total row. 195 tables out of 292 yield at least one verified identity; those yielding none do not ship.

A cross-check we had not programmed. The stock of legal entities comes out identical whether summed by legal form or by ownership: 209,415 at 31 December 2021, 215,136 six months later. Two different tables, two unrelated breakdowns, the same total.

Fifty-eight wilayas, not forty-eight. Algeria created ten in 2019, and later documents count them. This file carries them, and joins our other wilaya-level products on the official code.

What we do not publish. Percentages, which recompute from the counts and whose denominator varies from table to table. Rows whose label swallowed its values. And tables where no identity holds.

Source. Counts of registered agents, as published.