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Britain still lagging behind in the entrepreneurial stakes
CAROLINE MACLEOD
BRITAIN may be the most entrepreneurial major economy in Europe, but new research shows that it still lags behind Australia, New Zealand, the US and Canada.
The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) 2004, conducted by London Business School and Babson College in the US, found that British rates of entrepreneurship were marginally higher than those in Germany, France or Italy. It found that 6.3 per cent of the UK population is engaged in entrepreneurial activity compared to 6.1 per cent in France, 4.5 per cent in Germany and 4.3 per cent in Italy.
In contrast, over 11 per cent of adults in the US are either already running their own businesses or plan to start one.
Uganda, Peru, Ecuador and Brazil emerged with the highest levels of entrepreneurship. United States and Iceland both showed good entrepreneurialism rates and high national incomes. Japan, Belgium, Ital
y,
Sweden and Finland have the lowest levels of entrepreneurship at around 1.5 per cent of the adult population.
Thirty per cent of Europeans said they�d prefer to be employees rather than self-employed, citing "regular, fixed income" as a reason, compared with 16 per cent of Americans. A further 24 per cent of Europeans cited "stability of employment", compared with 10 per cent in the US.
In the UK, the gap between male and female entrepreneurs has closed slightly, although women are still less than half as likely as men to start a business. For every 100 men starting up their own business in 2004, 46 women also did so. Overall, some 177,000 women set up businesses in the UK last year, while women in rural areas are more entrepreneurial than those in urban and suburban areas.
Entrepreneurial activity among most ethnic minority groups was also found to be substantially higher in the UK than for white people. |
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