Creating an entrepreneurial society in Europe

The purpose of this work is to propose a framework, called Strategic Management of Places, which demonstrates how the underlying forces, namely labor and capital, lead to economic performance. Moreover, we discuss how policy decision-making is involved in aspects of the framework. There are four elements to the framework: factors and resources, spatial organization and structure, human dimension, and policy. We apply the framework to the European Union to analyze how the elements fared from 1990s to present day. We conclude with examples where strategic policy decision-making proved to be a success and illustrate how each region differs in what underlying forces work and how in order to achieve economic success.     

Total factor productivity and the role of entrepreneurship

The absence of evidence in the scholarly literature for a tested long-term relationship between entrepreneurship and economic growth is at odds with the importance attributed to entrepreneurship in the policy arena. The present paper addresses this absence, introducing entrepreneurship using four different and accepted models explaining the total factor productivity of twenty OECD countries with data for the period 1969–2010. Traditionally, entrepreneurship is not addressed in these models. We show that in all models—as well as a joint one—entrepreneurship has a significant influence while the remaining effects largely stay the same. Entrepreneurship is measured as the business ownership rate (number of business owners per workforce) corrected for the level of economic development (GDP per capita).