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Abstract
The European Commission in the scope of its cohesion policy tries to increase competitiveness of the European Union (EU) regions by supporting, beside many other instruments, entrepreneurial activities in the EU sub-national regions. This paper sheds an empirical light on the relationship between entrepreneurial activities and entrepreneurial perceptions on the one hand and the economic performance of regions eligible for EU regional policies in Spain and Germany on the other. Based on empirical data on the NUTS2 level, there will be analysis of whether previous EU support has later had an impact on entrepreneurial activities and/or entrepreneurial perception in the regions. The results show empirical evidence for a relationship between entrepreneurial activities and EU regional policies. However, other determinants such as gender and the role model function have an even stronger impact. Some of the results may help to increase the effectiveness of EC regional policies and of regional policies of the national governments, especially if the interdependence of entrepreneurship support policies and proper regional policies is considered.
Acknowledgements
A much earlier version of this paper was published in Maria Minniti's 2011 edited volume on entrepreneurial dynamics (see Sternberg, 2011). The author is grateful to Oxford University Press for permission to use some parts of that contribution. My particular thanks go to Alicia Coduras (Instituto de Empresa; GEM team Spain) for the provision of the individual data for Spain. Nicolas Reum deserves special praise for the laborious processing of the Spanish individual data without which the estimates presented here would not have been possible.
Notes
NUTS is the abbreviation for the French ‘Nomenclature des Unités Territoriales de Statistique’ (Nomenclature of Territorial Units for Statistics). This geocode standard has been developed by the European Union and it shows the subdivisions of EU countries for statistical purposes. EUROSTAT, the statistical office of the EU, has established a hierarchy of three NUTS levels for each EU member country (e.g. for Germany NUTS0=country, NUTS1=federal states or ‘Bundesländer’, NUTS2=’Regierungsbezirke’ (larger administrative regions) and NTUTS3=districts or ‘Kreise’). The NUTS system is instrumental in EU's Regional Policy Fund delivery mechanisms.