Opportunities for Entrepreneurship in Europe: An Examination of Startup and Business Development Indices

Technological change and lower barriers for entrepreneurship have transformed opportunities for doing business in Europe, creating a bright spot at a time of great political uncertainty. Across the continent, each country and region offers varying packages of costs, risks and opportunities for the entrepreneur, including policy incentives, startup support, human capital and cultural advantages. However, it remains challenging for policymakers and entrepreneurs themselves to compare these qualities against one another. In response, European Union bodies as well as scholars of public policy and business have sought to address this difficulty by developing a number of indices to make these evaluations more transparent.  What can these indices tell us about business opportunities and challenges across European states and regions? Why and how do these indices come to different conclusions about the countries and regions they find the most promising? This work examines and compares these indices, and investigates their considerable differences in measurement, methodology and validity.  I show that many of these indices take an individualized approach in framing opportunities for entrepreneurship, creating a number of implications for assessment. Despite utilizing different indicators and measurements, many of the variables chosen are related to one another and can be explained by shared phenomena. This assessment of the existing literature allows us to assess how these measurement tools have been used, and how they can be refined in the future.