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Entrepreneurship Measurement and Comparison: Holistic Acceptability Global Entrepreneurship Index

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Abstract

The Global Entrepreneurship and Development Institute annually publishes the Global Entrepreneurship Index (GEI) to show entrepreneurship of each country/area. The GEI is obtained by averaging the scores of three sub-indexes, entrepreneurial attitudes, entrepreneurial abilities and Entrepreneurial aspirations. However, this GEI construction method with equal weights for three subindexes may be controversial, since the relative importance among the three sub-indexes may vary across countries and areas due to economic and social/cultural reasons. This study comprehensively considers all possible weights, and formulates an interval entrepreneurship evaluation matrix. Employing the Stochastic multicriteria acceptability analysis, the authors build an improved GEI, which the authors term the Holistic Acceptability Global Entrepreneurship Index. This method differs from the conventional wisdom that assigns exact values to corresponding weights, but explores a weight space considering all possible weight sets. Finally, the proposed method is confirmed using an empirical study measuring and comparing the entrepreneurship of the top 20 countries and areas in terms of 2017 GEI.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Business Management, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing, 210016, China

    Lianlian Song

  2. College of Economics, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, 518060, China

    Kin Keung Lai

  3. Department of Management Science, City University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong, China

    Kwok Fai Geoffrey Tso

  4. Faculty of Science and Technology, University of Macau, Macau, China

    Jerome Yen

Authors
  1. Lianlian Song
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  2. Kin Keung Lai
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  3. Kwok Fai Geoffrey Tso
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  4. Jerome Yen
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Kin Keung Lai.

Additional information

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China under Grant No. 71602089, the National Natural Science Foundation of Jiangsu Province under Grant No. BK20160785, and Fundamental Research Fund under Grant No. NR2019015.

This paper was recommended for publication by Editor WANG Shouyang.s

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Song, L., Lai, K.K., Tso, K.F.G. et al. Entrepreneurship Measurement and Comparison: Holistic Acceptability Global Entrepreneurship Index. J Syst Sci Complex 33, 1959–1979 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11424-020-8240-y

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11424-020-8240-y

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