EMPIRICAL EVIDENCE ON ENTREPRENEURIAL INTENTIONS IN SOME BALKAN COUNTRIES

Many scientists assume that entrepreneurship plays an extremely significant role in economic development. In this frame, a part of literature has considered as crucial human behaviour and individual perceptions in explaining the intentionsto start up new firms over time. These issues are of strategic importance also in Balkan countries where a large part of the industrial production has been strongly weakened and many industrial branches have almost disappeared. The current economic crisis contributed to exasperate the labour market conditions even more than in other European regions and caused increasing unemployment within traditional industries. These considerations reveal the importance of cognitive process because they represent one of the mainpremisesof entrepreneurial activities and shapes individual entrepreneurial decisions. In this paper, we focus on potential entrepreneurs, that is, individuals expecting to start a new business in the next three years, trying to understand if the intention to start up a new business is influenced by stylised variables. Our empirical analysis is based on data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) for the period 2007-2012 and we test our hypotheses using a pooled logistic regression focusing on some selected countries from the Balkans. At the policy level some recommendations will be hypothesized in order to translate the analytical findings into diagnostics tools and assessment to foster entrepreneurship in the countries under observation.