We investigate which countries have the highest potential to achieve entrepreneurial progress. This progress is defined using an entrepreneurial ladder with five successive steps: “never thought about starting a business”, “thinking about starting a business”, “taking steps to start a...

This paper compares (former) transition and non-transition economies in Europe and Asia with respect to the opportunities available to achieve entrepreneurial progress. In addition, the differential impacts of three perceived environmental barriers to new venture creation are investigated....

The scholarly literature often distinguishes between so-called opportunity and necessity entrepreneurship and between ‘‘pull’’ and ‘‘push’’ motivations. Despite the pervasive use of this terminology, empirical analyses are mostly based on a single country. The present paper...

We test a new model where the entrepreneurial decision is described as a process of successive engagement levels, i.e., as an entrepreneurial ladder. Five levels are distinguished using nearly 12,000 observations from the 2004 “Flash Eurobarometer survey on Entrepreneurship” covering the 25...