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Perhaps reflecting the post-war opportunity and improved country profile, Sri Lanka has debuted in the influential Global Entrepreneurship Index (GEI) 2015, ranking at 71 out of 130 nations surveyed and 11th within the Asia Pacific region.
Released last week by the US-based Global Entrepreneurship and Development Institute (GEDI Institute) to mark the global week to celebrate entrepreneurship, the Index sheds light on the efficiency of national startup ecosystems through analysis of 34 essential individual and institutional variables under sub index themes of Attitudes, Abilities and Aspirations.
Sri Lanka is ranked at 103 in the Attitudes Sub Index, 54 in Abilities Sub Index and 59 in Aspirations Sub Index. Sri Lanka is also the best in South Asia this year on its entry whilst several regional countries such as India, Pakistan and Bangladesh had been featured in previous rankings.
The purpose of this index is to measure the quality and the scale of the entrepreneurial process in 130 countries around the world. The GEI provides a rich understanding of entrepreneurship and a more precise ability to measure it.
It also captures the contextual features of entrepreneurship by measuring entrepreneurial attitudes, abilities, and aspirations. These data, and the contribution they make to the process of creating businesses, are supported by three decades of research into entrepreneurship across a host of countries.
It attempts to reveal the bottlenecks that erode hard-won competitive advantages for startup ecosystems and provide rankings by region to provide policymakers regulatory environment comparisons with surrounding economies.
Whilst the US is number one, followed by Canada and Australia, top performers by region are UK in Europe, Chile in South and Central America and Caribbean, UAE in Middle East and North Africa, South Africa in sub Saharan Africa. The only two Asian countries in the Top 10 are Taiwan at number eight and Singapore at number 10. Biggest one year gains were recorded by Iran, Latvia and Greece.
Sixteen Asia Pacific nations are surveyed. India is ranked 104th, Pakistan at number 123 and Bangladesh at the bottom at 130th. Sri Lanka is also featured ahead of several other Asian countries such as Philippines (95th) and Indonesia (120) but lower in comparison to Korea (28), Japan (33), Malaysia (53) China (61) and Thailand (68).
The 14 pillars of entrepreneurship as per the Index are Opportunity Perception; Startup Skills; Internationalisation; Networking; Process Innovation; Risk Acceptance; Cultural Support; Human Capital; Technology Absorption; Opportunity Startup; Competition; High Growth; Product Innovation and Risk Capital.
GEDI said the globalisation of entrepreneurship is producing an explosion of programs, startup communities, policy interventions and investments across the world. Now, ideas, capital and talent speed across borders finding “founder teams” to create new ventures that fuel economic growth and stability. These are exciting times when a new generation of risk takers are levelling the playing field and creating new opportunities for more people.
Countries seeking to add entrepreneurial resilience to their economies benchmark their regulatory frameworks and ecosystem performance against other economies.
The Global Entrepreneurship and Development Institute (GEDI Institute) is a non-profit organisation that advances research on links between entrepreneurship, economic development and prosperity. The institute was founded by world-leading entrepreneurship scholars from the George Mason University, University of Pécs and Imperial College London.
The flagship project of the Institute is the GEI Index, a breakthrough advance in measuring the quality and dynamics of entrepreneurship ecosystems at a national and regional level. The Global Entrepreneurship Index methodology, upon which the data in this report is based, has been validated in rigorous academic peer reviews and has been widely reported in media, including in The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times and Forbes.
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