Critical Review of Internationally Comparable Entrepreneurship Activity Measures1

Abstract

Many studies that place entrepreneurship in the centre of their research, especially those exploring the influence of entrepreneurship on economic growth and development, often do not provide definitions and entrepreneurship measures that would be comprehensive enough for an in-depth empirical verification. Because measuring and internationally comparing entrepreneurship and its results are challenging tasks, the entrepreneurship measures must be carefully chosen and interpreted so that they can be appropriately considered when preparing policy-making recommendations. In this paper, we more precisely define the entrepreneurship measures most often used at the national level and identify their strengths and weaknesses as well as possible intersections.