The relationship between economic development and business ownership revisited

摘要

This paper revisits the two-equation model of Carree, van Stel, Thurik and Wennekers(2002) where deviations from the ‘equilibrium’ rate of business ownership play acentral role determining both the growth of business ownership and that of economicdevelopment. Two extensions of the original setup are addressed: using longer timeseries of averaged data of 23 OECD countries (up to 2004) we can discriminatebetween different functional forms of the ‘equilibrium’ rate and we allow for differentpenalties for being above or under the ‘equilibrium’ rate. The additional data do notprovide evidence of a superior statistical fit of a U-shaped ‘equilibrium’ relationshipwhen compared to an L-shaped one. There appears to be a growth penalty for havingtoo few business owners but not so for having too many.