A combined evaluation model for encouraging entrepreneurship policies

Initiating small and medium enterprises (SMEs) has become a major issue around the globe. There are many governmental factors that could influence entrepreneurship. To create a strong and energetic environment for new businesses, governments need to develop a spirit of business, remove a number of current obstacles, and provide various supports during the start-ups periods. Here, a critical question arises: how can the government effectively evaluate current policies and how much effort must they put into improving these policies in order to achieve the desired level of economic growth? This paper addresses this question by proposing a combined Multi-Criteria Decision-Making (MCDM) model, which integrates the Analytic Network Process (ANP) approach and the VlseKriterijumska Optimizacija I Kompromisno Resenje (VIKOR) method. The former approach is used to construct interrelations among criteria and to obtain criteria weights; the latter method allows the decision maker to realize policy gaps and to rank them in order of magnitude so that large gaps can be reduced to an aspired level. Overall, the study findings show at present, every entrepreneurships policy in Taiwan stands in need of improvement. The proposed model cannot only help the government to evaluate the relative effectiveness of their policies, but it also provides worthwhile recommendations toward the constructing of an ideal policy. Copyright Springer Science+Business Media, LLC 2014