Israel is rightly proud of its status as a startup nation. It boasts the world's highest concentration of high-tech startups per head. Almost 1,000 new firms are launched every year. But all this entrepreneurial activity is not creating enough jobs as the population grows: the share of people employed in the high-tech sector has declined from 10.7% of the workforce in 2006-08 to 8.9% in 2013. Startups also fail to solve another problem: the country's high retail prices, which are 20% higher for basic products than in other rich countries, according to the oecd, a think-tank. It doesn't come as a surprise then that Israelis have become less interested in the super-abundance of startups and more in the scarcity of big successful companies. The startup nation not only has too few of them, it also has the wrong sort. The big firms that dominate the country's stock exchange are the opposite of startups: not laser-focused organisations, but lumbering business groups that could not compete outside Israel. Worse, Israel's startups rarely turn into big companies.
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