Productivity Growth and Technology Gaps of the National Systems of Entrepreneurship: Is There a Convergence Pattern between Efficiency-Driven and Innovation-Driven Countries?

Entrepreneurship is an essential component to national economies, and a formidable engine of economic growth. Recognizing that success in entrepreneurship depends to a large extent on national context and local conditions our aim is to develop a framework to analyze national ecosystems and benchmark them with other countries to gain insights into the success or failure of entrepreneurial policies. This study uses a metafrontier framework with consideration to gauge the entrepreneurial ecosystem productivity across countries that operate under different technologies. Based on the metafrontier Malmquist productivity index, this paper analyzes the national entrepreneurial productivity of 30 countries over the period 2016–2018. By classifying the sample countries according to their level of economic development, we obtain that the efficiency-driven countries are the technology leaders in entrepreneurship, and innovation-driven countries are the followers. During the study period, the efficiency-driven countries have exhibited productivity growth of 0.5% which is mainly attributed by technological progress. Whereas, the innovation-driven countries have deteriorated their productivity by 0.7% which caused by their technological regress. Meanwhile the innovation-driven countries cached-up the world best practice technology at a faster rate than the efficiency-driven countries which indicate there was some convergence between the two groups over time.