The Best Country to Start a Business | WSJ.com

Zoltan Acs’ work on the Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index is covered by Jeff May in the Wall Street Journal today:

What’s more, some emerging-markets powerhouses like China, Russia, Brazil and India, as well as nations like Chile and the Czech Republic, are due for big improvements, says Zoltan Acs, a Small Business Administration economist and co-author of the agency’s study of entrepreneurial performance around the world. China, for instance, ranks as just the 40th best place in the world to start a company. Yet China and its up-and-coming peers score high on forward-looking measures like expectations for job creation—so they’re likely to catch up fast with more-advanced economies.

 

 

The best country to start a business… – WSJ.com.

New Entrepreneurship Ranking of Countries | US Not the Most Entrepreneurial

In the past 5 years while working on my PhD part-time at GMU, I have been fortunate to work with some incredible professors from various fields — economics, sociology, political science, history, and higher education. Two of them, Richard Florida and Zoltan Acs, have made incredible contributions in the fields of economic development, entrepreneurship, innovation, creativity, and technology policy.

Acs, who is my dissertation adviser, has been working with Laszlo Szerb in developing a new index for understanding entrepreneurship globally: the Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index.

The Christian Science Monitor covers the recent release of the US data on the GEDI. Past measures, including new firm formation, self-employment rates, the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s (GEM) Total Early-phase Entrepreneurial Activity index, the Index of Economic Freedom, and others have pushed the field forward, but have not always been useful in policy making and/or economic analysis.

The new index attempts to capture the ‘contextual features of entrepreneurship.’  The framework covers a broad range of variables and importantly attempts to include qualitative differences, rather than just the traditional quantitative variables used.  Further, the GEDI includes individual variables, not just institutional variables.

From the CSMonitor: