Entrepreneurship is a distant goal with regard to actions implemented by the policy makers. Although economic policy measures are market oriented, they are unrewarding with regard to entrepreneurialism resulting from the knowledge economy
The quest for votes and approval compels policy makers to enact measures that should collect the favors of the entrepreneurial and professional establishment. It appears that policy makers cannot escape the platitude that what is politically expedient is rarely economically beneficial. Restricting the horizon of their vision to incumbents in the markets as well as in public institutions, policy makers fail both to see the inventor who, by throwing a pebble into the pond of the economy, makes ripples on its somewhat swampy waters, and to catch sight of the ripple and turn it into a wave the new entrepreneur. If anything, entrepreneurship development is an indirect effect, even unintentional, of government measures. The regime of public regulatory policies makes all difference. As shown by the Global Innovation Policy Index, the blooming of entrepreneurship is abundant to a greater or lesser extent depending on whether starting a business involves respectively fewer or more bureaucratic procedures, days necessary for fulfillment, and less or more cost. It should be noted in particular that the policy makers are not required to interfere with business processes but, rather, to create the boundary conditions, the first of which is the education of new generations aimed at raising and exchanging ideas intertwined with an enterprising spirit, and stimulating a genuine confrontation of ideas-cum- entrepreneurship among young minds. The interference of policy makers in the process of new venture creation is stronger the greater the number of them embedded in the public sector or coming from bodies and businesses linked to the public administration; hence the prevalence of regulatory policies, which results in the growth of bureaucracy in central and local public administrations. Regulatory policies contain a large dose of bureaucratic obtuseness. For example, in Italy a start-up seeking access to public funds receives a response, positive or negative, from the relevant public body only after a considerable delay (eight months and more is not uncommon). The reasons for the outcome are not included in the notice delivered to the applicant. The public body concerned directs the applicant to the “decree approving the results of the investigations” ! a document whose bureaucratic lexicon can obstruct the applicant’s understanding of the basis of the outcome. The inflation and obtuseness of public apparatuses is paid, ultimately, through taxation which, while supporting employment in the public sector, drains resources away from more urgent issues – such as new entrepreneurship.
* For further details in this regard the reader is referred to “Grand Transformation to an Entrepreneurial Economy: Exploring the Void”, Emerald Publishing Group, 2015
