Data Bank

How is entrepreneurship good for economic growth? This question would seem to have a simple answer: Entrepreneurs create new businesses, and new businesses in turn create jobs, intensify competition, and may even increase productivity through technological change. High measured levels of entrepreneurship will thus translate directly into high levels of economic growth. However, the reality is more complicated.

It is important to distinguish between “necessity entrepreneurship” and “opportunity entrepreneurship.”Necessity entrepreneurship is having to become an entrepreneur because you have no better option, whereas opportunity entrepreneurship is an active choice to start a new enterprise based on the perception that an unexploited or underexploited business opportunity exists. Necessity entrepreneurship has no effect on economic development while opportunity entrepreneurship has a positive and significant effect.

The first global study of high expectation entrepreneurship has found that just 9.8% of the world’s entrepreneurs expect to create almost 75% of the job generated by new business ventures. The report defines high expectation entrepreneurship as all start-ups and newly formed businesses which expect to employ at least 20 employees within five years. These ventures have far reaching consequences for the economies in which they operate, particularly because of their impact on job creation and innovation.

In this report United Nations Secretary-General Kofi Annan, the Commission focuses on how business can create domestic employment and wealth, free local entrepreneurial energies, and help achieve the Millennium Development Goals.

Donors to charities, it seems, do not behave rationally. Increasing evidence shows that donors often tolerate high administrative costs, fail to monitor charities and do not insist on measurable results – the opposite of how they act when they invest in the stock market.

The biggest, fastest-growing economies of the Third World are Brazil, Russia, India, and China. But while the Big Four, also known as BRICs, have attracted the most investor attention in recent years, there are also opportunities in less prominent but more promising emerging markets such as Egypt, Mexico, Poland, South Africa, South Korea, and Turkey.

Warren Buffett. The most important thing you need to know about Israel today and how it has performed so far in the war with Hezbollah is Warren Buffet.

Young Israelis dream of being inventors, and their role models are the Israeli innovators who made it to the Nasdaq. Hezbollah youth dream of becoming martyrs, and their role models are Islamic militants who made it to the Next World.

There are a lot of ways to describe Latin America's challenge today. Some will tell you it's the age-old question of overcoming the staggering gap here between rich and poor. Some will tell you it's rooting out corruption and misgovernance. But I come at this issue with my own perspective, and I would describe the big question facing Latin Americans this way: Are they going to emulate India or get addicted to China?

It's well known that many executives who excel at starting businesses or projects fizzle out--in other words, they fail to "scale"--as their ventures grow. But the reasons have remained fuzzy. In this article, leadership coach John Hamm identifies four management tendencies that work for small-company or business-unit leaders but become Achilles' heels as those individuals try to run larger organizations. Leaders who scale deal honestly with problems and quickly weed out non-performers. They see past distractions and establish strategic priorities. They learn how to deal effectively with diverse employees, customers, and external constituencies. And, most important, they make the company's continuing health and welfare their top concern.

Entrepreneurship is receiving greater attention from policymakers and experts in developed and developing countries. New dynamic enterprises contribute to economic development in several ways: as an important channel to convert innovative ideas into economic opportunities, as the basis for competitiveness through the revitalization of social and productive networks, as a source of new employment, and as a way to increase productivity.

Lifting people out of poverty has become a mantra for the world's political leaders. The first U.N. Millennium Development Goal is to halve the number of people whose income is less than $1per day, currently about 1 billion people. And, in the past decade, millions around the world have been pulled out of poverty by economic growth, effective development aid, and sheer hard work.