The Relationship between Entrepreneurship and Unemployment: is Portugal an Outlier?

Rui Baptista () and Roy Thurik

Papers on Entrepreneurship, Growth and Public Policy from Max Planck Institute of Economics, Entrepreneurship, Growth and Public Policy Group

Abstract: The present paper examines the relationship between entrepreneurship, as measured by the variation in business ownership rates, and unemployment in Portugal in the period from 1972-2002. It concludes that Portugal has been a relative outlier in regard to the effects of entrepreneurship on unemployment when compared with the OECD average. Although the nature of entrepreneurship may be different in the Portuguese case, due to a high proportion of "micro-businesses" created for subsistence which have little impact on growth and employment, this factor does not seem to be the primary reason for the observed discrepancies. The differences between observed levels of unemployment for Portugal and those predicted by a model based on OECD data seem to be mostly associated with macroeconomic fluctuations associated with European business cycles and EU "cohesion" funding, as well as with adjustment costs to new technology adoption which lead to productivity slowdowns, thus increasing the time lag for the effect of entrepreneurship on employment beyond the OECD average.

Pages: 21 pages
Date: 2004-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-ent and nep-lab
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (9)

Downloads: (external link)
ftp://papers.econ.mpg.de/egp/discussionpapers/2004-40.pdf (application/pdf)
Our link check indicates that this URL is bad, the error code is: 500 Failed to connect to FTP server papers.econ.mpg.de: No such host is known.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:esi:egpdis:2004-40

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.econ.mpg. ... arch/EGP/discuss.php

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Papers on Entrepreneurship, Growth and Public Policy from Max Planck Institute of Economics, Entrepreneurship, Growth and Public Policy Group Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Kerstin Schück ( this e-mail address is bad, please contact ).