ABSTRACT
The emergence of large industries (the industrialization era) were considered the key drivers of economic growth in the mid-18th century through to the early part of the 19th century (Bruns, 2011). During this period, most of these large scale industries enjoyed economies of scale and this made them more efficient. Due to this, most economies, particularly the developed ones paid so much attention to the growth and expansion of large firms whiles micro, small and medium scale enterprises as well as entrepreneurship were thought out to impede economic growth and development. However, in recent years, entrepreneurship has become a central issue and as such the focus and attention has been shifted from large scale manufacturing and industrialization towards entrepreneurship. This could be attributed to advancement in the service sector, technological change, the quest for people to have their own businesses, to mention a few. This paper therefore examines the role entrepreneurship plays in economic growth and development across some selected high and low income countries. A longitudinal estimation technique is adopted to make the comparison. This approach concurrently account for the dynamic effect of the entrepreneurship and economic growth nexus across the cluster of countries. Data on 39 high income countries as well as 24 low income countries from a period of 1999 to 2019 were considered. It was observed that entrepreneurship has a positive impact on growth across the selected high income group of countries but within the context of low income group of countries, entrepreneurship does not necessarily aid growth.
