Resumo

Entrepreneurship is one of the key factors contributing to the countries’ economic growths. Implementing National Systems of Entrepreneurship (NSE) strategies to improve a country-level entrepreneurial performance has thus become one of the most important challenges for policymakers. The NSE performance is highly influenced by the complexities of interactions among individuals/entrepreneurs and their institutional context. Global Entrepreneurship Index (GEI) was develop to measure the NSEs performance.

However, GEI was not designed to assess countries’ NSE efficiency. This fact represents a challenge to policymakers to develop NSE strategies, with a view to improve the performance of entrepreneurial activity, in terms of rational use of resources. Our inquiry in this article is oriented towards addressing this gap based on the research question: How do countries perform in terms of entrepreneurial systems’ efficiency? Drawing from this approach, we also aim at identifying countries’ distance to the efficiency frontier, through a three-stage Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) model.

A NSE can defined as “the dynamic, institutionally embedded interaction between entrepreneurial attitudes, ability and aspirations, by individuals, which drives the allocation of resources through the creation and operation of new ventures” (Ács, Autio, et al., 2014, p. 479). GEI was develop to reminds policymakers of the need to improve the collaboration among interacting components in the entrepreneurial process and the influence of the entrepreneurial context on the performance and outcomes of new ventures (Ács, Audretsch, Lehmann, & Licht, 2016).

We classify the GEI variables into output, input and intermediate input indicators, and apply the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) to measure the efficiency scores of 25 countries with high-performance in GEI 2019 ranking. After that, we apply a three-stage DEA in GEI sub-index to assess the countries efficiency level in each stage of entrepreneurship process.

Our findings show that the GEI world leaders, such as the United States, are inefficient in some stages of entrepreneurial process. The United States, although the top of the GEI ranking, presents inefficiency in Stage 1. On the other hand, countries that traditionally are not used as references for the formulation of entrepreneurship policies, such as Iceland, Chile, Taiwan, United Arab Emirates, Luxembourg, Estonia and Slovenia proved to be efficient at all stages. Fact, which makes them references in best practices for the development of entrepreneurial systems strategies.

Our analysis allows us to question the parameters for the benchmarking of entrepreneurship policies which are based on simplistic assessments of aggregated classifications. These scores often address systemic issues from an “additive” perspective, mixing inputs and outputs as similar sets of resources, and without interdependent or correlated cause and effect relationships. Such simplistic views often point to the United States as a benchmark for best practices for other countries to base their own entrepreneurial policies.

Inácio Jr, E., Dionisio, E. A., Fischer, B. B., Li, Y., & Meissner, D. (2020). The global entrepreneurship index as a benchmarking tool? Criticisms from an efficiency perspective. Journal of Intellectual Capital. doi:10.1108/JIC-09-2019-0218 Ács, Z. J., Autio, E., & Szerb, L. (2014). National Systems of Entrepreneurship: Measurement issues and policy implications. Research Policy, 43(3), 476-494. doi:10.1016/j.respol.2013.08.016 Ács, Z. J., Audretsch, D. B., Lehmann, E. E., & Licht, G. (2016). National systems of entrepreneurship. Small Business Economics, 46(4), 527-535. doi:10.1007/s11187-01