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Entrepreneurial economics is the field of study that focuses on the study of entrepreneur and entrepreneurship within the economy. The accumulation of factors of production per se does not explain economic development. [1] They are necessary factors of production, but they are not sufficient for economic growth. [2]
William Baumol wrote in American Economic Review that "The theoretical firm is entrepreneurless – the Prince of Denmark has been expunged from the discussion of Hamlet". [3] The article was a prod to the economics profession to attend to this neglected factor.
Entrepreneurship is difficult to analyse using the traditional tools of economics, e.g. calculus and general equilibrium models. Current textbooks have only a passing reference to the concept of entrepreneurship and the entrepreneur. [4] Equilibrium models are central to mainstream economics, and exclude entrepreneurship. [5]
Coase believed that economics has become a "theory-driven" subject that has moved into a paradigm in which conclusions take precedence over problems. "If you look at a page of a scientific journal like Nature," he said, "every few weeks you have statements such as, 'We’ll have to think it out again. These results aren't going the way we thought they would.' Well, in economics, the results always go the way we thought they would because we approach the problems in the same way, only asking certain questions. Entrepreneurial Economics challenges fundamental principles, using insights from models and theories in the natural sciences." [6]
Studies about entrepreneurs in economics, psychology and sociology largely relate to four major currents of thought. Early thinkers such as Max Weber emphasized its occurrence in the context of a religious belief system, thereby suggesting that some belief systems do not encourage entrepreneurship. This contention has, however, been challenged by many sociologists. Karl Marx considered the economic system and mode of production as its sole determinants. [7] Weber suggested a direct relationship between the ethics and economic system as both interacted intensively.[ citation needed ]
Another current of thought underscores the motivational aspects of personal achievement. This overemphasized the individual and his values, attitudes and personality. This thought, however, has been severely criticized by many scholars such as Kilby (1971) and Kunkel (1971). [8]
Richard Cantillon (1680?-1734) was the earliest scholar of whom we know that paid considerable attention to the entrepreneur. [9] He introduced the very concept of entrepreneur. The entrepreneur is functionally described as arbitrager. The motivating factor is the potential profit generated from the activity of "buying at a certain price and selling at an uncertain price".
Jean-Baptiste Say, who has been an entrepreneur during a period of his life, recognizes the "superior kind of labour" of the entrepreneur. He is the "coordinator, modern leader and manager within his firm". [9] He is a kind of "super-manager" because the exercise of the function needs a combination of rare qualities and experience: "Judgement, perseverance, and a knowledge of the world as well as of business...the art of superintendence and administration". To Say, a successful entrepreneur must demonstrate prudence, probity and regularity. [10]
Frank Knight [11] saw the entrepreneur as someone who undertakes business decisions under conditions of 'uncertainty'. Knightian uncertainty exists where there is no basis for objective probabilities, so that it is unmeasureable and decisions have to be made using subjective judgment. The entrepreneur earns economic profits as a reward for good judgment. Entrepreneurs are seen as being confident and venturesome.
Schumpeter's concept is a synthesis of three different notions of the entrepreneur: risk bearer, innovator and a coordinator. He assigned the role of innovator to the entrepreneur, driving economic growth through a process of creative destruction, and not to the capitalist. Capitalists supply capital while entrepreneurs innovate. He stated that "whatever the type, everyone is an entrepreneur only when he actually carries out a new combination and loses that character as soon as he has built up his business, when he settles to running it as other people run their business." [12] The focus here is not on a category of person, but on a function. He was perhaps influenced by his family history. [13]
The Schumpeterian entrepreneur disrupts existing equilibrium. Innovation is a chaotic, unpredictable economic process, which cannot be modeled using the equilibrium based analytic methods used in mainstream economic theory.
Israel Kirzner, an economist of the Austrian School, sees the entrepreneur as an arbitrageur who is alert to opportunities for profit that exist due to market disequilibrium.
Harvey Leibenstein claimed that entrepreneurship is a creative response to x-inefficiency. Entrepreneurs are also gap-fillers, having the ability to perceive market opportunities and to develop new goods/services that are not currently being supplied. He postulates that entrepreneurs have the special ability to connect markets and make up for market deficiencies. Additionally, drawing from the theories of J.B. Say and Richard Cantillon, Leibenstein suggests that entrepreneurs have the ability to combine various inputs into new innovations in order to satisfy unfulfilled market demand. [14]
Baumol has argued that entrepreneurship can be either productive or unproductive. [15] Unproductive entrepreneurs may pursue economic rents or crime. Societies differ significantly in how they allocate entrepreneurial activities between the two forms of entrepreneurship, depending on the 'rules of the game' such as the laws in each society.
Audretsch defines the entrepreneur as the missing link between investment in knowledge and growth. It is the entrepreneur who adds value to scientific discovery. Entrepreneurship capital is then, just as capital and labor in a macroeconomic model, an essential factor of production in the economy. [16]
Joseph Alois Schumpeter was an Austrian political economist. He served briefly as Finance Minister of Austria in 1919. In 1932, he emigrated to the United States to become a professor at Harvard University, where he remained until the end of his career, and in 1939 obtained American citizenship.
This aims to be a complete article list of economics topics:
Evolutionary economics is a school of economic thought that is inspired by evolutionary biology. Although not defined by a strict set of principles and uniting various approaches, it treats economic development as a process rather than an equilibrium and emphasizes change, innovation, complex interdependencies, self-evolving systems, and limited rationality as the drivers of economic evolution. The support for the evolutionary approach to economics in recent decades seems to have initially emerged as a criticism of the mainstream neoclassical economics, but by the beginning of the 21st century it had become part of the economic mainstream itself.
Israel Meir Kirzner is a British-born American economist closely identified with the Austrian School.
In economics, internationalization or internationalisation is the process of increasing involvement of enterprises in international markets, although there is no agreed definition of internationalization. Internationalization is a crucial strategy not only for companies that seek horizontal integration globally but also for countries that addresses the sustainability of its development in different manufacturing as well as service sectors especially in higher education which is a very important context that needs internationalization to bridge the gap between different cultures and countries. There are several internationalization theories which try to explain why there are international activities.
Classical economics, classical political economy, or Smithian economics is a school of thought in political economy that flourished, primarily in Britain, in the late 18th and early-to-mid 19th century. Its main thinkers are held to be Adam Smith, Jean-Baptiste Say, David Ricardo, Thomas Robert Malthus, and John Stuart Mill. These economists produced a theory of market economies as largely self-regulating systems, governed by natural laws of production and exchange.
Frank Hyneman Knight was an American economist who spent most of his career at the University of Chicago, where he became one of the founders of the Chicago School.
Richard Cantillon was an Irish-French economist and author of Essai Sur La Nature Du Commerce En Général, a book considered by William Stanley Jevons to be the "cradle of political economy". Although little information exists on Cantillon's life, it is known that he became a successful banker and merchant at an early age. His success was largely derived from the political and business connections he made through his family and through an early employer, James Brydges. During the late 1710s and early 1720s, Cantillon speculated in, and later helped fund, John Law's Mississippi Company, from which he acquired great wealth. However, his success came at a cost to his debtors, who pursued him with lawsuits, criminal charges, and even murder plots until his death in 1734.
William Jack Baumol was an American economist. He was a professor of economics at New York University, Academic Director of the Berkley Center for Entrepreneurship and Innovation, and Professor Emeritus at Princeton University. He was a prolific author of more than eighty books and several hundred journal articles. He is the namesake of the Baumol effect.
The theory of the firm consists of a number of economic theories that explain and predict the nature of the firm, company, or corporation, including its existence, behaviour, structure, and relationship to the market. Firms are key drivers in economics, providing goods and services in return for monetary payments and rewards. Organisational structure, incentives, employee productivity, and information all influence the successful operation of a firm in the economy and within itself. As such major economic theories such as transaction cost theory, managerial economics and behavioural theory of the firm will allow for an in-depth analysis on various firm and management types.
The circular flow of income or circular flow is a model of the economy in which the major exchanges are represented as flows of money, goods and services, etc. between economic agents. The flows of money and goods exchanged in a closed circuit correspond in value, but run in the opposite direction. The circular flow analysis is the basis of national accounts and hence of macroeconomics.
In economics, a market is a composition of systems, institutions, procedures, social relations or infrastructures whereby parties engage in exchange. While parties may exchange goods and services by barter, most markets rely on sellers offering their goods or services to buyers in exchange for money. It can be said that a market is the process by which the prices of goods and services are established. Markets facilitate trade and enable the distribution and allocation of resources in a society. Markets allow any tradeable item to be evaluated and priced. A market emerges more or less spontaneously or may be constructed deliberately by human interaction in order to enable the exchange of rights of services and goods. Markets generally supplant gift economies and are often held in place through rules and customs, such as a booth fee, competitive pricing, and source of goods for sale.
Harvey Leibenstein was a Ukrainian-born American economist. One of his most important contributions to economics was the concept of X-inefficiency and the critical minimum effort thesis in development economics.
Mark Casson is a British economist and academic. He is a professor of economics at the University of Reading in England. He held the position of Head of Department from 1987until 1994 and is the institution's current Director of the Centre for Institutional Performance.
The history of economic thought is the study of the philosophies of the different thinkers and theories in the subjects that later became political economy and economics, from the ancient world to the present day in the 21st century. This field encompasses many disparate schools of economic thought. Ancient Greek writers such as the philosopher Aristotle examined ideas about the art of wealth acquisition, and questioned whether property is best left in private or public hands. In the Middle Ages, Thomas Aquinas argued that it was a moral obligation of businesses to sell goods at a just price.
David Bruce Audretsch is an American economist. He is a distinguished professor at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs (SPEA) at Indiana University and also serves as director of the SPEA International Office, Ameritech Chair of Economic Development, and director of SPEA's Institute for Development Strategies (IDS). He is co-founder and co-editor of Small Business Economics: An Entrepreneurship Journal, and also works as a consultant to the United Nations, the World Bank, the OECD, the EU Commission, and the U.S. Department of State. He was the director of the Entrepreneurship, Growth and Public Policy Group at the Max Planck Institute of Economics in Germany from 2003 to 2009. Since 2020, he also serves as a distinguished professor in the Department of Innovation Management and Entrepreneurship at the University of Klagenfurt.
Schumpeterian rents are earned by innovators and occur during the period of time between the introduction of an innovation and its successful diffusion. It is expected that successful innovations, in time, will be imitated, but until that occurs, the innovator will earn Schumpeterian rents. They were named after economist Joseph Schumpeter, who saw profits made by businesses as resulting from the development of new processes which disturb economic equilibrium, temporarily raising revenues above their resource costs. This type of profit is also called entrepreneurial rent.
Innovation economics is new, and growing field of economic theory and applied/experimental economics that emphasizes innovation and entrepreneurship. It comprises both the application of any type of innovations, especially technological, but not only, into economic use. In classical economics this is the application of customer new technology into economic use; but also it could refer to the field of innovation and experimental economics that refers the new economic science developments that may be considered innovative. In his 1942 book Capitalism, Socialism and Democracy, economist Joseph Schumpeter introduced the notion of an innovation economy. He argued that evolving institutions, entrepreneurs and technological changes were at the heart of economic growth. However, it is only in recent years that "innovation economy," grounded in Schumpeter's ideas, has become a mainstream concept".
Entrepreneurship is the creation or extraction of economic value in ways that generally entail beyond the minimal amount of risk, and potentially involving values besides simply economic ones.
Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy is a book on economics, sociology, and history by Joseph Schumpeter, arguably his most famous, controversial, and important work. It's also one of the most famous, controversial, and important books on social theory, social sciences, and economics—in which Schumpeter deals with capitalism, socialism, and creative destruction.
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