MANAGING ENTREPRENEURIAL CONDITIONS TO SUPPORT EARLY-STAGE ENTREPRENEURIAL ACTIVITY: A DATA ENVELOPMENT ANALYSIS

In this paper, we apply Data Envelopment Analysis with constant and variable returns to scale to study the technical efficiency of 42 countries for 2019 starting from 12 inputs and 3 outputs. The inputs represent the features of entrepreneurial framework conditions, which can be managed by governments to enhance or hinder new business creation, i.e., the outputs of total entrepreneurial activity (TEA) and the ratio of male-female TEA together with (iii) entrepreneurial intentions. The two models show that for the VRS approach, the number of efficient entities is larger than in the case of the CRS approach. The results show that the mean values of the CRS and VRS models reveal that the countries have entrepreneurial activities on the efficient frontier if the use of the input may be reduced by 7.73%, and by 3.17% under CRS and VRS models, respectively, without any decrease in the outputs.