The relationship between digitalization and entrepreneurship in expansionary and crisis economic phases

Entrepreneurship is one of the factors that receiving attention in recent decades due to its role in achieving certain economic objectives, such as employment and economic growth. For this reason, understanding the factors that stimulate it to design policy measures for enhancing entrepreneurial activity is relevant. One way to identify these factors is to consider the essential elements that make up entrepreneurship, namely, innovation, autonomy, and opportunities. From this perspective, digitalization, institutions, credit, and the economic environment are considered factors that stimulate entrepreneurship. The objective of this paper is to analyse the relationship between digitalization and entrepreneurship, while also considering the variables that can affect digitalization. Basically, in periods of crisis and expansion, these variables include the cultural factor and credit policy, and they are used to consider two economic situations: the expansive phase (or the prepandemic period of 2018–2019), and the crisis phase (or the pandemic period of 2020–2021). To achieve this objective, a theoretical and empirical analysis is conducted on 16 European countries using the partial least squares (PLS) method.