INDIVIDUAL AND CONTEXTUAL DETERMINANTS OF ENTREPRENEURSHIP: AN INTERNATIONAL COMPARATIVE ANALYSIS

Models of entrepreneurial behavior focus usually on individual level factors yet a great deal of beginning and running a business depends on the economic, social and institutional environment. Our analysis uses data from the 2008 European Social Survey to assess the weight of country-level characteristics in explaining individual entrepreneurship measured as self-employment of business ownership. The article starts with a literature review which puts the bases of our hypotheses. The results describe cross country comparisons of entrepreneurship rates, individual and country-level regressions of entrepreneurship. As expected, there are large differences between countries with respect to rates of entrepreneurship. A great part of this variance can be accounted for by the division between the former socialist countries and the rest and by levels of urbanization.