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Post-crisis entrepreneurs

The number of people setting up their own businesses so as to avoid unemployment has levelled off since the recent upturn in the economy

The onset of the crisis led to a rash of people becoming self-employed or setting up their own businesses, not because of a great business idea, but because they could not find a job. Despite this intense period of job destruction being over, this type of entrepreneur still exists because there are still sections of society that have not felt the benefit of the economic upturn, such as the over-45s. However, the number of forced entrepreneurs has levelled off.

According to figures from Barcelona Activa, before the crisis, some 42% of the companies the business promotion agency helped were set up by unemployed people, which during the crisis rose to 54%. Since then, the proportion of people setting up their own businesses to avoid unemployment has fallen to 34%.

This trend has been noted elsewhere, such as in the latest annual study by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM). Published in May, the report noted that while the number of entrepreneurs setting up businesses out of need went up last year, there was more growth among those entrepreneurs who had detected a market opportunity. In 2016, the proportion of entrepreneurs acting out of need was 27.2%, which fell to 26.6% in 2017, while the numbers of those starting new businesses out of opportunity went from 48.6% to 56.5%. The entrepreneurial rate for Catalonia at the end of last year stood at 8.03%, almost two percentage points above the Spanish average, and above that of the EU. This means that eight out of every hundred Catalans of working age were involved in setting up a business last year.

The survival of these business projects is vital and a recent survey carried out by GEM suggested that what is needed to consolidate these emerging companies is improved funding, better public policy and more trained staff.

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