Facts about entrepreneurship in Norway. Who become entrepreneurs and how do they perform?
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2013-11Metadata
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Abstract
The report focuses on the identification of entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial firms
from registry data. We provide characteristics of new firms: their distribution by
cohort, industry and size: their survival, growth and productivity patterns and
compare the results with corresponding patterns among incumbent firms. We then
address key questions regarding who become entrepreneurs and how they perform.
We define an entrepreneur as an individual having at least a blocking minority
position in a private incorporated company (>33 percent) and who is either an
employee or has a formal role (CEO, chairman of the board, or both) in the firm
during start-up.
The typical entrepreneur has at least upper secondary education (13−14 years of
schooling) when setting up a company. Most entrepreneurs have a background in
natural sciences, vocational and technical subjects (34 percent), general
programmes (23 percent) or business and administration (19 percent). In the
reference population, 13, 38 and 19 percent, respectively, have an education in
these fields. In terms of their main income source, 75 percent of new entrepreneurs
are wage earners and 16 percent are self-employed prior to becoming
entrepreneurs, compared to 85 and 4 percent, respectively, in the reference
population.
The share of female entrepreneurs is less than one fifth during the whole period
2001-2011. The much higher entrepreneurship rates for men compared to women
have very little to do with educational field; the relative entrepreneurship rate for
men are in the range of 3−5 times higher than for women across all main fields of
education.
Whereas the number of entrepreneurial firms makes up roughly 3/4 of all new
firms in a given cohort, their shares of their cohort’s total assets, sales revenues or
employment during start-up are roughly 60 percent. Overall, entrepreneurial firms
exhibit lower relative size growth (measured in terms of sales revenues and number
of employees) than corresponding cohorts of all new firms, whereas new surviving
firms grow much faster than surviving incumbent firms. Still, the incumbent firms
of 2002 make up 85 percent of total sales revenues in 2011, whereas firms
established in 2002−2010 account for 13 percent and firms established in 2011
make up only 2 percent. In terms of labor productivity (value added per employee)
growth rates are quite similar between entrepreneurial firms and other (new or
incumbent) firms.