A Framework for Addressing and Measuring Entrepreneurship

In recent years entrepreneurship has become a buzzword that?s entered the mainstream. Politicians continuously cite its importance and the need to create more entrepreneurial societies, and newspapers and television programmes frequently create themes around successful entrepreneurs. But, the pursuit and development of policies related to entrepreneurship are often hampered by the limited, albeit growing, empirical information relating to entrepreneurship (its size, factors and benefits). Therefore, in the absence of definitions that capture the essence of entrepreneurship, and entrepreneurship indicators that are internationally comparable, policy makers are left somewhat rudderless when it comes to developing policies, particularly when they relate to learning from international best-practice. These shortcomings and the growing importance of entrepreneurship in the policy domain have magnified the need for a sounder basis for internationally comparable indicators of entrepreneurship. This paper provides a framework that is intended to provide that sounder basis. It does so by adopting a holistic approach, and, so, by focusing on the: factors that impede or motivate entrepreneurship (determinants); measures that provide indicators of the state of entrepreneurship (entrepreneurial performance); and, outcomes (impacts) of that performance on the economy as a whole. Each of these three themes provides the overarching structure to the framework, using a standardised OECD definition of entrepreneurship, and, within each, we develop a suite of indicators that provide the basis for quantifiable information to be collected in an internationally comparable way for each of these themes.