Entrepreneurship and local development in post-communist Central and Eastern Europe – new challenges are ahead: editorial

Abstract

workshop entrepreneurship, local-level policy initiatives aimed at stimulating rigorous reviewing several (2022), in their paper entitled ‘The relationship between unemployment and entrepreneurship at the local level: the case of Poland’, investigate the impact of unemployment and employment rate on new firm registrations in the service sector in Poland. The results of their analysis indicate a pronounced relationship between rising unemployment and increasing numbers of new service businesses between 2003 and 2018. The authors conclude that there is a relatively pronounced role of necessity entrepreneurship in the service sector. At the same time, the authors do not identify a single mechanism for the impact of unemployment on new business entry across different parts of the service sector. Nevertheless, they show that those parts of the service sector that are highly concentrated (financial services) or provide public goods (education, healthcare) are less affected by rising unemployment as compared to other service businesses. This sectoral calibration of the unemployment–entrepreneurship link has useful policy implications at the local level.