Public policy to promote entrepreneurship: a call to arms

By Zoltan J. Acs, Tom Åstebro, David B. Audretsch, David T. Robinson. Small Business Economics, 2016

414 citations recorded by the source corpus.

We debate the motivation for and effectiveness of public policies to encourage individuals to become entrepreneurs. Reviewing established evidence we find that most Western world policies do not greatly reduce or solve any market failures but instead waste taxpayers’ money, encourage those already intent on becoming entrepreneurs, and mostly generate one-employee businesses with low-growth intentions and a lack of interest in innovating. Most policy initiatives that would have the effect of promoting valuable entrepreneurship would not be recognizable as such, because they would primarily address other market failures: A central-payer health care would remove healthcare-related distortions affecting employment choices; greater STEM education would produce more engineers of which some start valuable new firms; and labor market reform to encourage hiring immigrants in jobs they have been educated for would reduce inefficient allocation of talent to entrepreneurship.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/28dbdd061423dbeeea21e3b361153896ce96b0d3

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Citations in the corpus

The Schumpeterian entrepreneur: a review of the empirical evidence on the antecedents, behaviour and consequences of innovative entrepreneurship (2017, neutral): “…of public policy to promote entrepreneurship (e.g. Baumgartner and Caliendo 2008; Kösters 2010; Koski and Pajarinen 2013; Rannikko and Autio 2016), the recent academic debate on public policy to promote entrepreneurship has become very critical, and almost cynical (Shane 2009; Acs et al. 2016).”
The digital entrepreneurial ecosystem (2017, neutral): “The entrepreneurship literature focuses on thousands of small startups and often these small startups fail due to the lack of customer base (Acs et al. 2016).”
The lineages of the entrepreneurial ecosystem approach (2017, positive): “A small elite within the population of start-ups is able to scale-up, by building a platform on which others can create and exchange value (Acs et al. 2016).”
The relevance of quantity and quality entrepreneurship for regional performance: the moderating role of the entrepreneurial ecosystem (2018, background): “In particular, the EE takes a significant part in shaping quantity- and quality-related business structures, and they are the hotbed of start-ups (Acs et al., 2016).”
Perceived public support and entrepreneurship attitudes: A little reciprocity can go a long way! (2020, neutral): “In this regard, it has been observed in the past that favourable institutions and policies encourage entrepreneurial activity (Autio & Fu, 2015), although the influence of such policies is sometimes debated and considered counterproductive (Acs, Åstebro, Audretsch, & Robinson, 2016; Shane, 2009).”
Women’s entrepreneurship policy research: a 30-year review of the evidence (2019, background): “, 2012); thus, effective entrepreneurial policies can help address market failures and promote economic growth (Acs et al., 2016).”