The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) 2013 report has identified entrepreneurs as one of the happiest individuals across the globe when it comes to individual well-being and satisfaction with their work conditions.
The GEM report unveiled in Santiago, Chile, is the 15th annual survey of entrepreneurship worldwide and the largest single study of entrepreneurship in the world.
The report finds entrepreneurship a satisfying career choice worldwide – especially for women within innovation-driven economies.
The GEM report entitled: “Entrepreneurship and Well-Being’’, also found that women entrepreneurs from innovation-driven economies showed, on average, higher degrees of personal well-being than their male counterparts.
Entrepreneurs worldwide, both at the established and early-stage phases, exhibited higher ratings on subjective well-being compared to populations not involved in entrepreneurship activities.
This, the report noted, suggested that entrepreneurship could be a good career choice for most.
A co-author, José Ernesto Amorós said “Our idea is to contribute to a better understanding about what influences a population’s perceptions about well-being and how that consequently shapes entrepreneurship indicators’’.
The report revealed that in all regions, entrepreneurs exhibit higher rates of subjective well-being in comparison to individuals who are not involved in the process of starting a business or owning-managing a business.
Another relevant result in the report showed that female entrepreneurs in innovation-driven economies exhibited on average a higher degree of subjective well-being than males.
“This initial assessment opens up possibilities for exploring the role of women and men entrepreneurs beyond the traditional notion of development generally associated with economic indicators”, Amorós said.
The report was co-authored by José Ernesto Amorós, Universidad del Desarrollo in Chile and Global Entrepreneurship Research Association (GERA); and Niels Bosma, Utrecht University in the Netherlands.
In 2013, more than 197,000 individuals were surveyed and approximately 3,800 national experts on entrepreneurship participated in the GEM study across 70 economies, including Nigeria.
The GEM report also grouped the economies into three development levels based primarily on GDP/capital and share of exports comprising primary goods: factor-driven, efficiency-driven, and innovation-driven.
Factor-driven economies, like Nigeria, are dominated by subsistence agriculture and extraction businesses, with a heavy reliance on (unskilled) labour and natural resources.
The report indicates that efficiency-driven economies are more competitive with further development accompanied by industrialisation, economies of scale, and dominant capital-intensive large organisations.
It added that innovation-driven economies are more knowledge-intensive with a fully developed and dominant service sector.
The samples in the GEM 2013 Global report represent an estimated 75 per cent of the world’s population and 90 per cent of the world’s total GDP.
In addition to its annual measures of entrepreneurship dynamics, GEM analysed well-being as a special topic in 2013.
The primary measure of GEM is the Total Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) rate, which consists of the percentage of individuals aged 18 – 64 years in an economy who are in the process of starting (start-ups) or are already running new businesses (new firms).
The 2013 survey reveals that Nigeria and Zambia has the highest TEA rate of 39 per cent among factor-driven economies, indicating that 39 out of every 100 Nigerians are engaged in some kind of entrepreneurial activity.
In 2013, Nigeria recorded a TEA rate of 35 per cent placing 5th behind Zambia (41 per cent), Ghana (36 per cent), Uganda (36 per cent), and Malawi (35 per cent).
This confirms Nigeria’s position as an entrepreneurial nation where most adults see opportunities in entrepreneurship, believe in their own entrepreneurial capacities and declare themselves ready to start and run a business.
The survey result provides ample opportunity for policy makers, at all levels of government, to use the promotion of business as a strategy for poverty eradication, wealth creation, employment generation and sustainable development.
The GEM Nigerian team is hosted by Tomeb Foundation for Youth Development and Entrepreneurship.
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