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The Policy Dialogue on Entrepreneurship Informs and connects thought leaders looking to understand policies that help entrepreneurs start companies, create jobs and strengthen the economy. Sign up to receive our weekly update!
During this past Week I have been “Globe Blogging” and have reported from the road about various Global Entrepreneurship Week (Nov. 16-22) policy events among others from around the world. Entrepreneurs, development organizations, policy leaders and entrepreneurship researchers lent their voices and experiences to some series policy dialogues. When top-level officials engaged in Global Entrepreneurship Week they sent a message to their constituents about the government’s support for entrepreneurship, making young minds even more comfortable with the idea of doing good through the marketplace. Let’s hope decision makers will be motivated to more urgently enact regulatory reforms and advance other polices to bolster their nation’s entrepreneurial climate.
Welcome to Global Entrepreneurship Week. Throughout this week, I will be reporting in from entrepreneurship policy events around the world. Global Entrepreneurship Week is engaging more than four million participants in 887 countries exploring new venture creation as a career path through mentoring activities, business plan competitions, networking events and other fun activities. It offers an extraordinary demonstration to policymakers that there is a new wave of entrepreneurialism before us and if we want to build economies and make jobs, they must quickly create the most favorable environment possible.
The record number of pro-entrepreneurship legal and regulatory reforms in the past year among the economies studied by the World Bank’s Doing Business project is welcome news during a time of global economic recession. Prioritizing reforms and learning from global best practices hold enormous potential to unleash entrepreneurship. To maximize this potential, leaders must also promote a culture that embraces entrepreneurship.
I was alarmed last week to see the House introduce a health care overhaul bill with a measure to punish certain businesses that do not provide health insurance. Companies with payrolls exceeding $400,000 will have to pay a penalty equal to 8% of payroll. Companies with payrolls between $250,000 and $400,000 a year would pay between 6 and 2 percent, and only those with less than $250,000 would be exempt.
With Global Entrepreneurship Week initiative, the Kauffman Foundation has been promoting the appreciation of entrepreneurship around the world and energizing the young to become entrepreneurs.
It is inevitable that a healthy economy will create new job opportunities, while also displacing existing jobs, as successful ventures survive and grow while others fail– even in good times. The process of job creation and economic growth relies on the constant “churning” of firms. Even so, new firms are responsible for the large majority of net new jobs in the U.S. From 1980-2005, firms less than five years old accounted for all net job growth in the country. This is why we need to approach labor rules carefully.
Taxes influence decisions regarding hiring, financing structure, and ownership structure. Taxes also often affect the very decision to launch a business. Given these incentive effects, yet another important task for this Administration should be to question whether our taxes are helping or hindering entrepreneurially-driven economic growth.
The economic downturn has placed a new focus on how to generate more “job creators” in our economies and made the idea of a global celebration of entrepreneurship as a path back to positive growth rates especially relevant. This past Saturday marked the 100-day countdown to what is now the largest entrepreneurship event in the world, kicking off November 16th, 2009 - Global Entrepreneurship Week - and I am asking for your help.
Many readers of this blog are familiar with the Kauffman Foundation and its work around the role of the entrepreneur as the chief agent for innovation, job creation and economic growth. Today, I would like to comment on another contribution of entrepreneurship to society- the expansion of human dignity.
As with any politically loaded term, any attempt at honest discussion of ‘regulation’ risks getting caught up in a web of assumptions and intellectual shortcuts. One common fallacy is to put government regulation (e.g. patent laws, health care, tax compliance regulations, etc.) on one end of a continuum in which innovation and entrepreneurship are the opposite policy preference. However, a new approach seems to be emerging in innovation discussions: that the freedom to innovate is not governed by how much or how little regulation innovators face, but how smart it is.
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