The hidden role of philanthropy in enriching America's prosperity—and the world's Philanthropy has long been a distinctive feature of American culture, but its crucial role in the economic well-being of the nation—and the world—has remained largely unexplored. Why Philanthropy Matters takes an in-depth look at philanthropy as an underappreciated force in capitalism, measures its critical influence on the free-market system, and demonstrates how American philanthropy could serve as a model for the productive reinvestment of wealth in other countries. Factoring in philanthropic cycles that help balance the economy, Zoltan Acs offers a richer picture of capitalism, and a more accurate backdrop for considering policies that would promote the capitalist system for the good of all. Examining the dynamics of American-style capitalism since the eighteenth century, Acs argues that philanthropy achieves three critical outcomes. It deals with the question of what to do with wealth—keep it, tax it, or give it away. It complements government in creating public goods. And, by focusing on education, science, and medicine, philanthropy has a positive effect on economic growth and productivity. Acs describes how individuals such as Benjamin Franklin, Andrew Carnegie, Bill Gates, and Oprah Winfrey have used their wealth to establish institutions and promote knowledge, and Acs shows how philanthropy has given an edge to capitalism by promoting vital forces—like university research—necessary for technological innovation, economic equality, and economic security. Philanthropy also serves as a guide for countries with less flexible capitalist institutions, and Acs makes the case for a larger, global philanthropic culture. Providing a new perspective on the development of capitalism, Why Philanthropy Matters highlights philanthropy's critical links to the economic progress, health, and future of the United States—and beyond.
First Published in 1999. The process of globalization is shaped and reinforced by a rapidly changing knowledge environment. As economies become less constrained national frontiers they become more geographically specialized. Thus, important elements of the innovation process tend to become regional rather than national. In this new environment, large corporations are weakening their links with their home country, spreading their innovation activities to source different regional systems of innovation. Regional networks of forms are creating new forms of learning and production. The aim of this book is to broaden, both conceptually and empirically, the 'national systems of innovation' approach, developed by Lundvall, Freeman, Nelson and others. While recognizing the creative nature of economic adjustment in a turbulent world and the highly uneven distribution of economic growth, the national systems approach lacks a mechanism by which to understand innovation when realistic unit of analysis is no longer the nation state. Written by leading scholars in the field, this book provides a ground-breaking examination of sub-regional systems of innovation in an interconnected global economy.
This volume captures the context features of entrepreneurship and fills a gap in the measurement of development. Building on recent advances in entrepreneurship and economic development, the authors have created an index that offers a measure of the quality of the business formation process in 120 of the most important countries in the world. The authors expertly capture the contextual feature of entrepreneurship by focusing on entrepreneurial attitudes, entrepreneurial abilities and entrepreneurial aspirations. The data and their contribution to the business formation process are supported by three decades of research into entrepreneurship across a host of countries. The Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index is a construction of individual and institutional measures that integrates 31 variables from various data sources into 15 pillars, three sub-indexes and a 'super index'. The relationship between entrepreneurship and economic development appears to be more or less mildly S-shaped. The findings suggest moving away from simple measures of entrepreneurship across countries illustrating a U-shaped or L-shaped relationship to more complex measures, which are positively related to development. The model has important implications for development policy. This unique book will be invaluable for researchers, policymakers and entrepreneurs keen to expand their understanding of entrepreneurship and development.
The spillovers in knowledge among largely college-educated workers were among the key reasons for the impressive degree of economic growth and spread of entrepreneurship in the United States during the 1990s. Prior 'industrial policies' in the 1970s and 1980s did not advance growth because these were based on outmoded large manufacturing models. Zoltan Acs and Catherine Armington use a knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship to explain new firm formation rates in regional economies during the 1990s period and beyond. The fastest-growing regions are those that have the highest rates of new firm formation, and which are not dominated by large businesses. The authors of this text also find support for the thesis that knowledge spillovers move across industries and are not confined within a single industry. As a result, they suggest, regional policies to encourage and sustain growth should focus on entrepreneurship among other factors.
Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries surveys the literature on entrepreneurship in developing countries, which covers a wide range of issues from culture and values, institutional barriers such as financial sector development, governance, and property rights, to the adequacy of education and technical skills. A broad literature has also developed on foreign direct investment and its positive and negative effects on technology transfer and entrepreneurship. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, a number of studies examined the development of small- and medium-sized enterprises in transition economies. As these economies moved from centralized economies to market economies, enterprise and entrepreneurship became important. Other studies examine the effects of infrastructural development and the macroeconomy on entrepreneurship. With such a wide scope of issues, Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries offers a framework for synthesizing this growing literature. This study offers that the identification of the externalities which affect entrepreneurship provides a useful framework to examine the literature on entrepreneurship in developing countries. Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries: - Examines the evolution of development policy - beginning with the colonial period and the immediate post-colonial era. In both of these periods there were strong government intervention and a heavy emphasis on government planning for development. An important cornerstone of the post-colonial period was the use of import substitution programs. - Second, with the failure of import substitution, many developing countries then switched to export promotion. - Third, we set out a framework to explore the literature on entrepreneurship in developing countries based on the existence of network, knowledge and demonstration, and failure externalities. - Fourth, the authors identify the core policy issues to address these externalities and argue that internalizing these externalities by finding mechanisms to reward and encourage the firms and people which produce them, should increase the level of productive entrepreneurship in developing countries.
This brief captures the contextual features of entrepreneurship by measuring entrepreneurial attitudes, abilities, and aspirations at both the individual- and country-level. Featuring data from the 2016 Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index (GEDI), which measures the quality and scale of the entrepreneurial process in 133 countries around the world, this book provides a tool to help policymakers and governments harness the power of entrepreneurship to address some of the economic challenges faced at the country level. In addition to the yearly data and comparisons, this edition also explores the relationship between entrepreneurship and other measures of development. Distinct from both output-based entrepreneurship indexes (i.e., new firm counts) and process-based indexes (i.e., comparisons of policies and regulations, the GEDI is designed to profile national systems of entrepreneurship. The Index does not simply count new firm registrations nor is it an exercise of policy benchmarking. It also does not focus exclusively on high-growth entrepreneurship; it considers the characteristics of entrepreneurship that enhance productivity, such as innovation, market expansion, globalization, and growth potential. Finally, recognizing that entrepreneurship has a different impact in different economic and institutional contexts, the GEDI combines individual-level data with data that describes national institutions, as well as economic and demographic structures, to provide an institutionally embedded view of the drivers of productive entrepreneurship.
This brief presents a detailed look at the entrepreneurial ecosystem of nations around the wold by combining individual data with institutional components. Presenting data from the 2017 Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index (GEDI), which measures the quality and scale of entrepreneurial process from 137 countries world-wide, this book provides a rich understanding of entrepreneurship and a more precise means to measure it. In addition to yearly data and comparison, this 2017 edition also explores the digital entrepreneurial ecosystem and provides a detailed analysis of two measurements of entrepreneurship: the GEDI and the Total Early-Stage Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) measure. Whereas developed countries will be challenged to increase their economic productivity to sustain current standards of living as their populations rapidly age, developing economies will need to integrate more than two billion young adults into the world economy by 2050. How can more than one billion jobs be created in the developing world within this timeframe, especially in the least developed countries, where poverty and massive unemployment are already dominant facts of economic life? How can we measure, monitor, and build the ecosystems to produce such growth? The GEDI is designed to profile national systems of entrepreneurship. It links institutions and agents through a National Entrepreneurial System (ecosystem) in which each biotic and abiotic component is reinforced by the other at the country level. The resulting data gives policymakers a tool for understanding the entrepreneurial strengths and weaknesses of their countries’ economies, thereby enabling them to implement policies that foster productive entrepreneurship. The GEDI also helps governments harness the power of entrepreneurship to add these types of challenges.
This volume provides a detailed look at the entrepreneurial ecosystem of different nations by combining individual data with institutional components. The composite index presented in this book, the Global Entrepreneurship Index (GEI), aims to measure the quality and scale of the entrepreneurial process in 130 countries around the world. The authors have developed a system that links institutions and agents through a National Entrepreneurial System (ecosystem) in which each biotic and abiotic component is reinforced by the other at a country level. The enclosed data, from both individual- and country-level institutions, provides policymakers a tool for understanding the entrepreneurial strengths and weaknesses of their respective economies, thereby enabling the implementation of policies that foster productive entrepreneurship. Distinct from both output-based entrepreneurship indexes (i.e., new firm counts) and process-based indexes (i.e., comparisons of policies and regulations), the GEI is designed to profile national systems of entrepreneurship. The GEI is a construction of individual and institutional measures that integrates 31 variables from various data sources into 14 pillars, three sub-indexes and a ‘super index’. The relationship between entrepreneurship and economic development appears to be more or less mildly S-shaped. The findings suggest moving away from simple measures of entrepreneurship across countries illustrating a U-shaped or L-shaped relationship to more complex measures, which are positively related to development. The Index also does not focus exclusively on high-growth entrepreneurship; it also considers the characteristics of entrepreneurship that enhance productivity: innovation, market expansion, being growth oriented, and having an international outlook. Moreover, because entrepreneurship can have both economic and social consequences for the individual, the GEI captures the dynamic, institutionally embedded interactions between the individual-level attitudes, abilities, and aspirations that drive productive entrepreneurship. This unique book will be invaluable for researchers, policymakers and entrepreneurs keen to expand their understanding of entrepreneurship and development.
High-impact companies are a very important source of economic and job growth. Identifying the drivers and barriers behind their development is key to developing a sound supporting policy framework. The Global Entrepreneurship Development Index (GEDI) can interpret and measure entrepreneurial capacity as a systemic phenomenon. For that reason it provides a powerful means of assessing regional entrepreneurial performance. This paper begins by analyzing GEDI results in order to draw a picture of how well entrepreneurship systems perform in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC). The lessons drawn from this analysis are deepened through the qualitative analysis of nine case studies on the creation and development of successful high-impact companies in the region.
Knowledge has in recent years become a key driver for growth of regions and nations. This volume empirically investigates the emergence of the knowledge economy in the late 20th century from a regional point of view. It first deals with the theoretical background for understanding the knowledge economy, with knowledge spillovers and development externalities. It then examines aspects of the relationship between knowledge inputs and innovative outputs in the information, computer and telecommunications sector (ICT) of the economy at the regional level. Case studies focusing on a wide variety of sectors, countries and regions finally illustrate important regional innovation issues.
This book presents the 2020 Digital Platform Economy Index (DPE Index). The DPE Index integrates two separate but related literatures on ecosystems, namely, the digital ecosystem and the entrepreneurial ecosystem. This new framework situates digital entrepreneurship within the broader context of users, platforms, and institutions, such that two biotic entities (users and agents) actuate individual agency, and two abiotic components (digital infrastructure and digital platforms) form the external environment. The DPE Index framework includes 12 pillars that integrate the digital and the entrepreneurship ecosystems. Here, the authors report on the DPE Index, the four sub-indices, and the 12 pillar values for 116 countries as well as provide a cluster analysis based on the 12 pillars.
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