Characteristics of entrepreneurial activities in transitional countries and their influence on development

Abstract

© 2014, Kauno Technologijos Universitetas. All rights reserved. GEM approach in measuring the volume of entrepreneurial activities and their interrelations with the general social, economic and entrepreneurial conditions, on the one side, and the results of economic activities at the level of national economy on the other side, gives a whole, systematically and methodologically well established understanding of entrepreneurship as a significant factor of the cited environment.Thus, available data of the GEM project allow analysis and identification of potential specific group of transition countries compared to other countries with different development levels in terms of the achieved level of economic development, growth and size and structure of entrepreneurial activity by using the application of statistical methods for determining differences between groups using MANOVA, ANOVA and discriminant analysis. The results of this study showed that the group of transition countries show specific differences in terms of the achieved level of development, the level of economic growth and the size and structure of entrepreneurial activity as a special economic area with a high degree of homogeneity with respect to the observed phenomena, and selected variables in comparison to other groups of countries. Not all of this means that the entrepreneurship in less developed countries, in this case, transitional countries, should be discouraged for their contribution to economic development because of the identified environmental limits; on the contrary, small businesses and entrepreneurial projects represent the driving force to go through crises and the factor of economic stabilization in transitional countries.