Entrepreneurship, Geography, and American Economic Growth

Description

The spillovers in knowledge among largely college-educated workers were among the key reasons for the impressive degree of economic growth and spread of entrepreneurship in the United States during the 1990s. Prior 'industrial policies' in the 1970s and 1980s did not advance growth because these were based on outmoded large manufacturing models. Zoltan Acs and Catherine Armington use a knowledge spillover theory of entrepreneurship to explain new firm formation rates in regional economies during the 1990s period and beyond. The fastest-growing regions are those that have the highest rates of new firm formation, and which are not dominated by large businesses. The authors of this text also find support for the thesis that knowledge spillovers move across industries and are not confined within a single industry. As a result, they suggest, regional policies to encourage and sustain growth should focus on entrepreneurship among other factors.

Zoltan J. Acs is the Doris and Robert McCurdy Distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship and Innovation in the Robert G. Merrick School of Business, University of Baltimore, and a Research Scholar at the Max-Planck Institute for Economics. Previously he was a Research Fellow at the U.S. Bureau of the Census and Chief Economist at the U.S. Small Business Administration. Professor Acs has published over 75 scholarly articles in leading academic journals and twenty books. His most recent publication is Innovation and the Growth of Cities (2002). He is the founder and editor of Small Business Economics, the leading international journal in entrepreneurship and the recipient of the 2001 Small Business and Entrepreneurship Research Award given by the Swedish Foundation for Small Business. Professor Acs's primary research interests are entrepreneurship, technological change and economic development. Catherine Armington is a Research Fellow in the U.S. Bureau of the Census.

"I would encourage all researchers interested in entrepreneurship or economic geography to look at this volume. Acs and Armington identify numerous empircal regularities that should stimulate the development of new theories and motivate more casually oriented empirical investigations of particular mechanisms. And the appendices provide a wealth of descriptive information on regions that others may use to incorporate information from LEEM/BIC data into their own research." - Olav Sorenson, University of Toronto, Administrative Science Quarterly