Entrepreneurship and economic development: the valley of backwardness

This paper identifies the impact of productive, unproductive, and destructive entrepreneurship on social value creation. The paper constructs a Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index (GEDI) that captures the contextual feature of entrepreneurship across countries. We find the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic development to be mildly S-shaped. It is seen that the stages of development are more varied at the innovation-driven stage than at either the factor-driven stage or the efficiency-driven stage. Implications for public policy suggest that institutions need to be strengthened before entrepreneurial resource can be fully deployed.