Classification of countries according to their entrepreneurship level: UTADIS application

The fact that entrepreneurship can change, enhance or facilitate the world through an idea, makes it important for societies. This leads to a consensus on the promotion of entrepreneurship. However, supporting entrepreneurship needs a solid policy base. To create this policy base, two tools could be useful: identifying the factors that affect entrepreneurship and examining good practices across the world. This study aims to inform policy makers by carrying out an analysis that can generate important inputs for these two instruments. Within this framework, countries are classified according to their entrepreneurship level by using UTADIS which is a Multi Criteria Decision Analysis method. During the conduction of the analysis, improvements in the method have been proposed in order to reach the highest classification accuracy possible. A preliminary analysis is performed to this end: conducting a multivariate regression analysis in advance of UTADIS. Consequently, important findings are obtained in two distinct fields. First, the findings of the method improvement efforts indicate that regression analysis can increase the classification accuracy and regulate the criteria weights. In addition to this, an out-of-sample test is conducted to check the method and a moderate level classification accuracy is achieved. Secondly, policy findings shed light on the development of entrepreneurship in Turkey. The results indicate that Turkey, as a 2. group country, is similar to other countries in the same group. However there is still room for development especially in the areas such as public policies and programs, entrepreneurship education and training and physical and service infrastructure.