Entrepreneurship Episode as a Part of a Human Life Time

Aneta Ptak-Chmielewska, Warsaw School of Economics

Main goal of Eurostat and OECD Entrepreneurship Indicators Programme is to find and measure the main factors influencing the success of start-ups concentrating on micro and small enterprises. Being entrepreneur is one of the phases in men and women life time. In this paper I try to describe the basic demographic characteristics of entrepreneurs (self-employed). Who is the winner and how it influences his lifetime. Data come from retrospective survey of small and micro enterprises in one region of Poland. I try to compare my results with Eurostat data from all UE countries. I applied event history models: Kaplan-Meier life tables (univariate analysis) and Cox regression model (multivariate analysis). There are more men than women starting their entrepreneurs careers and they are more successful. Highly educated entrepreneurs and those for whom it was the only source of money have higher chances of survival.