Entrepreneurship and economic growth in spanish and portuguese regions

Abstract

This paper seeks to examine the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic growth at a regional level in Spanish and Portuguese NUTS II. Our panel model is based on the idea by Audrestsch et al (2006), Koo and Kim (2009), and other authors, about the importance of adding economically useful local knowledge variables to the classical model of economic growth, that only included labor and capital. Theses variables are: research and development, human capital, entrepreneurship and social capita. We built two different measurements for entrepreneurship : the ratio of companies created over the total in each region for the years of study, and a cross-section measurement that can be considered as an indicator of survival. These measurements do not offer similar results, which shows the importance of achieving a good measure of entrepreneurship, one ideally combining many different aspects. We find a positive effect of the entrepreneurship variable on GDP growth, in per capita terms and in absolute values.