The Effect of Credit Allocation on Entrepreneurship

Abstract

This paper aims to empirically assess Schumpeter's view that access to credit is vital for entrepreneurial activities. Credit allocation refers to the allocation of bank credits by the monetary authorities to non-financial economic activities. To measure the scope and penetration of entrepreneurship, two common indicators are used: The New Business Entry Density (ED) of the World Bank (WB) and Total Early-stage Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM). Our sample for the first case includes 66 countries over the period 2006 to 2016, and for the second case, 54 countries during the period 2001 to 2016. The results rejects the hypothesis of the impacts of credit allocation on entrepreneurship in the case of former indicators, but do not reject it in the case of the latter indicators. Furthermore, the sensitivity of the results to the choice of entrepreneurship measure indicates that further inquiries as well as alternative indicators are required to address the Schumpeterian hypothesis.

Keywords

• entrepreneurship
• credit guidance
• non-financial business
• financial business
• panel data