Entrepreneurship Measurement and Comparison: Holistic Acceptability Global Entrepreneurship Index

The Global Entrepreneurship and Development Institute annually publishes the Global Entrepreneurship Index (GEI) to show entrepreneurship of each country/area. The GEI is obtained by averaging the scores of three sub-indexes, entrepreneurial attitudes, entrepreneurial abilities and Entrepreneurial aspirations. However, this GEI construction method with equal weights for three subindexes may be controversial, since the relative importance among the three sub-indexes may vary across countries and areas due to economic and social/cultural reasons. This study comprehensively considers all possible weights, and formulates an interval entrepreneurship evaluation matrix. Employing the Stochastic multicriteria acceptability analysis, the authors build an improved GEI, which the authors term the Holistic Acceptability Global Entrepreneurship Index. This method differs from the conventional wisdom that assigns exact values to corresponding weights, but explores a weight space considering all possible weight sets. Finally, the proposed method is confirmed using an empirical study measuring and comparing the entrepreneurship of the top 20 countries and areas in terms of 2017 GEI.