Entrepreneurial Activity in the U.S.

The Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index (GEDI) attempts to evaluate and measure the "entrepreneurial data" from various countries and compares them, country to country, with the hopes of rating entrepreneurial activity in the US and 119 other countries across the world. This is admittedly very soft stuff and is the kind of analysis that gets imbued into studies and literature by repetition and tradition. The 2014  study was carried out by researchers from Imperial College Business School in association with the London School of Economics and Political Science, University of Pécs and George Mason University.
In the GEDI for 2014, USA came top, followed by Canada and Australia in second and third place, respectively.

The paper declared, "While the United States has faltered on the Index of Economic freedom and some other measures it has continued to outperform all other countries on entrepreneurship. And the gulf between the United States and other countries is large and appears to be widening and not narrowing. What explains this is an eco system that is both deep and wide at the same time."

The U.S. is high in access to venture capital and has high support for women entrepreneurs. In other areas, the US scores strongest, ranking first overall, for producing innovative products and services that are not currently offered by other businesses. This testifies of the potential of entrepreneurship to discover new sources of growth in the US economy.
The US also ranked first for the quality of human resources flowing to entrepreneurship. Whereas in many countries, the brightest students choose safer employment, the best and brightest in the US are more likely to choose an entrepreneurial career.
However, the US was weak in terms of networking, ranking fourteenth overall. Remarkably this seems to be due to expense of Internet access. The U.S. has relatively low Internet use when compared to Europe.

An Ernst and Young Survey showed the U.S. first in most aspects of entrepreneurship with some startling exceptions, especially taxes, support and regulations, all very controllable:







One distressing article in the Atlantic showed the U.S. in decline. There are some serious problems with their economic generalities, particularly in definitions. For example, one popular approach used by economists to evaluate entrepreneurship is to count how many new businesses with paid employees start up each year, then divide them by the number of companies that are already up and running. But that favors countries with small business bases (Canada, Israel, England) and slights larger based economies like the U.S..
And America has a large number of single person businesses, family businesses that manage small problems, are seasonal or employ family members. These types skewer results. For example, the statistics show that small businesses in the U.S. have a lower growth rate and employ fewer people. At the same time job growth is linked to small businesses almost exclusively; the small business that progresses to 20 employees. This disparity is likely the result of the single/family business owner who has little growth plan diluting the numbers.



One other point: There are ages of entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs come from younger age groups; most are from 20 to 45. That demographic is favored in the U.S. as the rest of the developed nations are aging and the U.S. is not.