Entrepreneurship and Local Growth - a comparison of the U.S. and Sweden

The U.S. is traditionally viewed as an economy driven by entrepreneurs, whereas the Swedish model is associated with high welfare ambitions and less focus on entrepreneurial activities. This paper seeks to empirically investigate whether the connection between entrepreneurship and growth at the regional level differs between the U.S. and Sweden. By regressing annual entrepreneurship on regional employment growth (and controlling for other conceivable variables impacting employment growth) entrepreneurship is shown to be positively and significantly associated with regional growth in both countries in the 1990s. Still, the result is more robust for the U.S. Other important variables for regional growth is business density and, in the case of the U.S., educational levels and internal scale economies.