This paper is an introduction to the special issue from the 3rd Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Research Conference held in Washington, D.C., in 2008. The paper has three objectives. First, to discuss the importance of the three stages of economic development, the factor-driven stage, the efficiency-driven stage and the innovation-driven stage. Second, to examine the empirical evidence on the relationship between stages of economic development and entrepreneurship. Third, to present a summary of the papers in the context of the theory.

Policy makers have identified the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic development. Yet, little is known about how this relationship varies over time in cities with different market sizes. This study examines the link between entrepreneurship and economic development using a panel of 127 European cities between 1994 and 2009. We found that the immediate economic development impact of new firm start-ups is positive for both small-/medium-size cities and large cities. The relationship is U-shaped for large cities, with the indirect effect taking 7 years, but the indirect effect does not occur in small-/medium-size cities. We offer useful information for policy makers, practitioners, and scholars. JEL Classification

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High-growth firms (HCF) represent a highly desirable subset of firms, which provide disproportionate economic gains, and greater insight into their determinants which is of interest to policymakers, scholars and business owners. We contribute to the literature on HGFs, which is largely absent of cross-national institutional studies, by examining the institutional conditions driving HGFs in 26 transition countries over a long period comprising three panels between 1998 and 2009. Using an institutional hierarchy approach, we test for the influence of formal and informal institutions on HGF prevalence in countries. Our analysis relies first on a principal component analysis to identify institutional factors. Second, we use GLS estimation to test the influence of these three factors on HGF prevalence in a country, followed by a robustness check. Our results show that interaction effects, rather than direct effects, are useful in explaining systematic variations in HGFs prevalence in transition economies. We find that the interaction between formal and informal institutions positively influences HGFs. Further, we find that in fast-reforming transition economies, more burdensome formal institutions discourage HGFs but in slowreforming transition economies, informal institutions encourage HGFs.

Tax policies and corruption are important institutional considerations which can shape entrepreneurship. We investigate how tax rates, and the interaction between corruption and tax rates, influence variations in entry across a panel of 72 countries in the period 2005-2011. We use a series of panel estimations as well as several robustness checks to test these effects, using relevant controls for economic development, the size of the state, and other regulatory and tax policy measures. We find that higher tax rates consistently discourage entry. Further, we find that although the direct influence of corruption on entry is also consistently negative, the interaction influence of corruption and tax rate is positive. This indicates that corruption can offset the negative influence of high taxes on entry. We discuss the implications of our findings for policymakers and future research.

This article provides and tests a theoretical framework with a multilevel (country–city) nested model to analyze the relationship between national business regulations (NBRs) and city level entrepreneurship. While public interest theory predicts a positive relationship between NBR and city level entrepreneurship, public choice theory predicts the opposite, a negative relationship. Based on multilevel analysis for a matched country–city panel of 228 cities across 20 European countries for the years 2004 to 2009, the empirical evidence from panel data estimation explains how changes in NBRs influence changes in city level entrepreneurial activity over time.

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This paper discusses the difficulties associated with measuring entrepreneurship in developing countries. Three important dichotomies in the research on entrepreneurship are discussed: formal-informal, legal-illegal, and necessity-opportunity. Several common measures of entrepreneurship are outlined along with their relevance to developing countries, including self-employment, Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data, World Bank Group Entrepreneurship Survey data and OECD data. The implications of the current understanding of entrepreneurship are discussed with respect to institutions and economic development.