The Netherlands

This chapter consists of sections on Introduction, Historical Overview, The Environment for Entrepreneurship and Toward the Future. Introduction, as follows:The Netherlands is the European part of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, which from 1954 to 2010 included the now defunct Netherlands Antilles. In 1986, the Caribbean island of Aruba separated from the Netherlands Antilles becoming an autonomous part of the kingdom; in 2010, Curaçao and Sint Maarten1 became autonomous countries within the kingdom. Also formerly islands of the Netherlands Antilles, Bonaire, Saba, and Sint Eustatius are special municipalities of the kingdom.The Netherlands has a surface area of 41,547 square kilometres, including 33,811 square kilometres of land. Its neighbours are Belgium and Germany. Provinces of the Netherlands include Noord (North) Holland, Zeeland, and Zuid (South) Holland. With the exception of several pockets such as Volendam, which were traditionally Catholic, the northern part of the Netherlands is generally inhabited by Protestants. The south is largely Catholic.The Dutch have long been known for their Calvinistic trading spirit, and for the “Dutch engineering genius” (Kruisinga, 1933, p. 298), innovation (Borah, 1938), and technology — including windmills (see Exhibit 16.1) that created polders and expanded available land area (Schot, 1998). McDowell wrote, “people of the Netherlands plug away at problems with characteristic ingenuity” (1986, p. 501)…