Entrepreneurship, Geography, and American Economic Growth

This text explains how economic growth spread through entrepreneurship in the United States in the 1990s.

Zoltan J. Acs (Author), Catherine Armington (Author)

9781107402539, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 21 July 2011

264 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.5 cm, 0.39 kg

"I would encourage all researchers interested in entrepreneurship or economic geography to look at this volume. Acs and Armington identify numerous empircal regularities that should stimulate the development of new theories and motivate more casually oriented empirical investigations of particular mechanisms. And the appendices provide a wealth of descriptive information on regions that others may use to incorporate information from LEEM/BIC data into their own research." - Olav Sorenson, University of Toronto, Administrative Science Quarterly

The spillovers in knowledge among largely college-educated workers were among the key reasons for the impressive degree of economic growth and spread of entrepreneurship in the United States during the 1990s. Prior 'industrial policies' in the 1970s and 1980s did not advance growth because these were based on outmoded large manufacturing models. Zoltan Acs and Catherine Armington use a knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship to explain new firm formation rates in regional economies during the 1990s period and beyond. The fastest-growing regions are those that have the highest rates of new firm formation, and which are not dominated by large businesses. The authors of this text also find support for the thesis that knowledge spillovers move across industries and are not confined within a single industry. As a result, they suggest, regional policies to encourage and sustain growth should focus on entrepreneurship among other factors.

1. Introduction
2. Entrepreneurship and economic growth
3. Regional variation in entrepreneurial activity
4. Human capital and entrepreneurship
5. Entrepreneurship and employment growth
6. Summary and conclusions
7. A formulation of entrepreneurship policy.

Subject Areas: Political economy [KCP], Economic theory & philosophy [KCA], Economics [KC]