The Wealth of (Open Data) Nations? Examining the interplay of open government data and country-level institutions for entrepreneurial activity at the country-level

Data has been highlighted as ‘the new oil’ for the digital economy. Within this context the provision of Open Data (OD) has been promoted by governments around the world with the hope of fuelling entrepreneurial use of the data for new products or process innovations. However, these benefits are still far from being fully understood and realised, and it remains unclear to what extent OD leads to systematic benefits for entrepreneurship. This paper aims to shed light to this open question by providing novel empirical evidence on the relationship between OD publishing and entrepreneurial outcomes at country-level. We draw upon a longitudinal dataset comprising 90 countries observed over the period 2013-2016. We find a significant and positive association between OD adoption and entrepreneurship at the country-level. The results also show that OD adoption and entrepreneurship is strong in countries with high institutional quality. We argue that unless a country has quality institutions, publishing OD alone does not positively affect entrepreneurship for the digital economy. Publishing OD is not sufficient to improve entrepreneurship alone, so states need to move beyond a focus on OD initiatives and promotion, to focus on a broader set of policy initiatives that promote good governance.