Endeavor

company's informalities (OCDE, 2007). Public manag- ers should, by principal, worry about the consequenc- es of entrepreneurial activity and design policies that adequately maximize their social impact. The central issue, though, is that public managers can only pro- duce such impacts indirectly. The best mechanism is to create conditions, like an adequate environment, that allows entrepreneurship to develop as well as promotes good companies performance. The notion of entrepreneurial performance is central to this study and can be understood in several ways: as intensity of entrepreneurial activity, as the entrepre - neurs' economic performance, or as the generation of wealth and/or jobs by entrepreneurial activity. Along the lines of the framework adopted by Endeavor Brazil, entrepreneurial performance is the result of a set of de- terminants affected by the decisions of public officials. Entrepreneurial performance and its determinants have with each other, in theory, a relationship of cause and ef- fect. In that sense the determinants congregate the es- sential factors explaining the entrepreneurial performance of Brazilian cities. In the framework of this study, these factors are organized in seven determinants: Regulatory Environment, Infrastructure, Market Conditions, Access to Capital, Innovation, Human Capital and Culture. The se- ven determinants, adapted to the country's reality, were constructed from the studies adopted as benchmarks — OECD/Eurostat and Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs — and based on the opinions of experts in various topics surveyed by Endeavor. The expectation is that cities able to create good condi - tions for the development of entrepreneurial activity — that is, producing favorable determinants — have a better performance in the future. Therefore, the research work of this study is, in essence, to measure the performance's determinants. The final ranking is a combination of all the determinants with values and weights set according to their correlations with performance, as explained in the following pages. None of the determinants are adequate - ly represented by just one single indicator, and the same can be said of overall performance, so, for the purposes of this framework study, indicator groups and variables were taken into account. Each key indicator is the parameters under which public managers and others can act to change the business environment. analYtICal pErspECtIvEs on EntrEprEnEursHIp and Its dEtErmInants The determinants that make up the framework are based on international studies on entrepreneurship, public poli- cy and economic development. There is no single body of knowledge on the subject and there are different perspec- tives on entrepreneurship and their causes. Still, there is a consensus that the level of entrepreneurial activity varies from country to country and certainly from city to city. The explanations are, in general, economic and social, as the study points out. More important than the nature of expla- nation, however, is the fact that the entrepreneurial deter- minants are directly associated with public policy choices. That is, you can influence the intensity of entrepreneurial activity through institutional, economic and political choic- es. (Hoffmann, Oxholm & Larsen, 2006). The plurality of explanations is the result of different conceptualizations of what is entrepreneurship and how to measure it. Part of the explanation for the entrepre- neurial degree is of macro policy, for which the causes of entrepreneurship merge with the factors that explain the growth or economic development of countries or regions. In this perspective, some of the conventional topics of macroeconomics and international economics are direct- ly connected to explanations on entrepreneurship. The focus of projects like these is to effect change in national industries, in the overall performance of firms in general or in the basic parameters of the economy. Institutional and environmental factors have great weight in studies that adopt this perspective. On the other hand, there are explanations on micro vari - ables, which's analytical focus is the individual entrepre- neur. Instead of observing the variations in size of the industries or the emergence of new businesses, these studies seek to understand, through the characteristics of an individual and of their surroundings, the real chances to start or manage a business successfully. In the individual entrepreneur perspective, the economy is accompanied more often by other academic disciplines, such as sociolo - gy and psychology. The skills of the entrepreneur and the decision and motivation to undertake play a central role in this case. 87

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