European Strategies for National Entrepreneurship and Growth: An investigation of the European coordination of Member State economic policy

Abstrakt

In 2010, the European Commission introduced the Europe 2020 framework as the overarching strategy for coordinating European and national economic policy and ensuring growth in the coming decade. One of the main pillars of this framework is the Innovation Union, which aims to improve framework conditions for entrepreneurship, research, and innovation in order to stimulate economic growth and employment. The thesis is motivated by scepticism toward this European model, due to the disappointing economic results achieved under the previous framework, the Lisbon Strategy. The thesis sets out to examine the European model of economic policy coordination that underlies both the Lisbon Strategy and the Innovation Union. Given that the strategies focus on improving the institutional environment for entrepreneurship, the thesis intends to explore how these environments are constructed at the European and member state level through the Innovation Union and member state reform programmes. In addition, the thesis examines the role of institutional entrepreneurs in this process, and the potential consequences for long-term economic growth. Building on the fundamental insights of the individual-opportunity nexus, this thesis proposes an expanded model, the EIO nexus, that to a much larger extent includes the institutional environment as an active factor in the process of creating and supporting entrepreneurship and growth. This framework incorporates the individual-institutional interaction as a key driver of entrepreneurship. Following the EIO framework, the analysis shows how European and Danish reforms address many important determinants of entrepreneurship. However, a substantial share of these reforms is based on the creation of institutional platforms that function as enabling conditions for institutional entrepreneurship. These conditions enable organisations and institutional actors to collaborate with the aim of improving the institutional environment for entrepreneurship. The collaborations are shown to have several positive relationships with economic growth. However, regions and member states that lack the economic and institutional conditions to support and attract institutional actors may not benefit equally. This inability to act upon the improved framework conditions may lead to a skewed distribution of entrepreneurship and economic impact. This throws the long-standing objective of economic and institutional convergence in Europe into question.