Defining and measuring
entrepreneurship.
by Iversen, Jens^Jorgensen, Rasmus^Malchow-Moller, Nikolaj
Abstract
Although entrepreneurship has become a buzzword in the public
debate, a coherent definition of entrepreneurship has not yet emerged.
In this paper, we review and compare the most common theoretical
definitions of entrepreneurship in economics and discuss their
connection to the various empirical measures in use. We argue that
entrepreneurship is best considered a multifaceted concept, and that the
different empirical measures reflect different aspects of
entrepreneurship. The relevance of this exercise is illustrated by the
fact that in a cross-country comparison of entrepreneurship, we find
that the relative ranking of countries depends crucially on the
indicator used.
Keywords: Entrepreneurship; definitions; measurement; cross-country
comparison.
JEL code: B10, J2, M13, O3
Jens Iversen (1), Rasmus Jorgensen (2) and Nikolaj Malchow-Moller
(3)
(1) Centre for Economic and Business Research (CEBR) and University
of Aarhus, Denmark, jiv@cebr.dk
(2) Centre for Economic and Business Research (CEBR) and University
of Copenhagen, Denmark
(3) Centre for Economic and Business Research (CEBR) and University
of Southern Denmark, Denmark
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