ABSTRACT
In social terms, economic and financial crisis is almost entirely translated to big increases in unemployment. Recent research has been focused on analysing whether the generation of start-ups could be a tool for generating employment. Stangler and Litan (2009) found that 66 per cent of the net employment generated during 2007 in the US comes from firms younger than five years old. Similar figures have been found in Europe (Malchow-Møller et al. 2009). Moreover, Mueller et al. (2008) found that start-up generation entails an increment of employment beyond the threshold of five or six years of existence. This is consistent with previous literature (Audretsch and Fritsch 2003; Birch 1981; Van Stel and Storey 2004; Fritsch and Mueller 2004). All this evidence found in the literature leads us to believe that entrepreneurs help to overcome the negative consequences of the financial and economic crisis. Regardless of the economic shocks, the study of the creation of enterprises as a mechanism to enhance regional competitiveness and to promote economic growth has developed an extensive line of research that in recent years has enjoyed growing popularity. A key unresolved question is to disentangle the causality between economic growth and entrepreneurial activity; is the entrepreneurial activity procyclical with increases during expansionary periods (Rampini 2004) or, rather, is it a determinant of economic growth? Recent evidence supports the latter (Audretsch and Keilbach 2004b; Wong et al. 2005; Van Stel et al. 2005; Acs et al. 2009). More precisely, Koellinger and Thurik (2009, p.7) claimed that ‘fluctuations in entrepreneurship help to predict GDP with 95 per cent confidence’.
