Entrepreneurship is often understood as an "urban event", also on the part of spatial policies. However, there is little empirical evidence on the role of new enterprises for the economic development of rural regions. The Federal Ministry of Agriculture and Food wants to change this and is therefore funding a three-year research project on the topic of "Entrepreneurship in rural areas: scope, determinants and regional economic effects (EntreLR)". In a research consortium of the Institute of Economic and Cultural Geography at Leibniz University Hannover (project leader: Rolf Sternberg), the ZEW Leibniz Centre for European Economic Research (Mannheim, Georg Licht) and the Thünen Institute of Rural Areas (Braunschweig, Christian Hundt), two goals are to be achieved. First, entrepreneurship processes in rural and non-rural areas will be described and explained. Secondly, determinants of the emergence, growth and effects of start-ups will be identified in a theory-based manner and empirically tested with the help of several large data sets in order to identify typical patterns and mechanisms that can be used to distinguish entrepreneurship in rural and non-rural areas.
The economic geographers Rolf Sternberg and Lennard Stolz, who are involved in the project in Hanover, will use data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) in particular to analyse rural areas not only in Germany, but also to compare them internationally.
