Factors affecting the entrepreneurial dynamics in Italy: a comparison across European countries

The main aim of this paper is to provide a better understanding of the factors explaining the entrepreneurial rates in Italy and the differences with the same factors in a sample of EU countries. The reason for this study is that during the last decade Italy showed one of the lowest rates of entrepreneurial activity and declining over time. The analysis takes into consideration both, macroeconomic factors, such as the overall institutional context that support entrepreneurship and micro level factors, such as the status of individuals and their response to entrepreneurial push or pull factors. The main findings are that gender, level of education, social perception of self-employment as a good career choice and social network have an impact on the probability to become nascent entrepreneur but with different relevance across countries and across sectors in the same country. The data show that in Italy the level of education become irrelevant to explain the propensity to start a business if the social capital and the importance of social networks are added to the econometric model.