New Business Creation An International Overview

Understanding the origins of new businesses—the firm creation process—has been dramatically affected by the development of longitudinal studies of business start-ups. A number of projects have been implemented to track the development of new firms, starting with the emergence of a business idea and organization of a start-up team through the birth of an operational business. The U.S. projects, the first and second Panel Studies of Entrepreneurial Dynamics (PSED I, II), have counterparts in a number of other countries, Australia, Canada, China, Latvia, Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden. These eight projects, implemented over the past decade, are at different stages of development and have been utilized for a wide range of assessments of entrepreneurial and business creation phenomena. This volume presents the state of the art of these international research projects, providing the first in-depth comparison of the firm creation data across a wide range of contexts, including developing countries (China), central European countries (Latvia) as well as advanced Anglo countries (Australia, Canada, and the United States) and advanced Western European countries (Netherlands, Norway, and Sweden). The work will be of great interest to the research community, particularly those developing such projects in their own countries, as well as policy makers and scholars interested in the effect of national context on the business creation process.