Defining and Measuring Entrepreneurship

Defining and Measuring Entrepreneurship reviews the most common concepts of entrepreneurship from the theoretical economics literature, identifying common elements and pointing to important differences. The purpose is to compare these theoretical ideas of entrepreneurship with the measures used in empirical country-level studies.

Since a coherent or unifying definition of entrepreneurship has not emerged, the authors explain that it is important to be precise about the relationship between the different theoretical aspects of entrepreneurship and the empirical measures. This is revealed by comparing entrepreneurial activity across OECD countries using measures that reflect different theoretical aspects. Based on various data sources, the relative ranking of countries is very sensitive to the empirical measure used.