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: Continue reading “New Entrepreneurship Ranking of Countries | US Not the Most Entrepreneurial”