The Impact of Economic Growth on the Dynamics of Enterprises: Empirical Evidence for Slovenia’s Non-agricultural Sector

Abstract

The aim of this paper was to test the hypothesized U-shaped relationship between economic development and dynamics of enterprises. The dynamics of enterprises is influenced by the achieved economic development. This paper first analyzed the association between the regional gross value added (GVA) growth rate and different measures of enterprises dynamics from Slovenian data from 2000 to 2005. Our graphical analyses indicated that 1) the rate of gross entry and GVA growth rate were linearly and negatively associated; 2) the association between the rate of gross exit and GVA growth rate is best represented by the downward U-shape function (Ç); and 3) a U-shaped association exists between the rate of net entry and GVA growth rate. The size of the impact was estimated using the regression analysis between the net entries as dependent variable and GVA growth as independent variable that showed the best fit. According to the results, 1) economic growth significantly impacts net entries; 2) the hypothesized U-shaped relationship between net entries and economic growth was confirmed as the Slovenian net entries decrease until the GVA growth rate reaches 10% yet increase when the growth in GVA is higher than 10%; and 3) a ‘natural rate’ of entrepreneurship is to some extent governed by ‘laws’ related to the economic growth rate. The results further indicate that the average net entry rate should be increased by 0.787 units (%) as a result of a region’s specific environmental factors. This research confirms the theoretical assumptions that have previously been sparsely tested empirically and even rarely supported by results. Therefore, our results represent a contribution to the robustness of the theoretical as well as empirical clarification of the relationship between entrepreneurship and economic development.