Small Business Entrepreneurs in Europe:

Would you start your own business in Europe? If not, it might be because of the weak entrepreneurial environment for starting entrepreneurs! Europe possesses many skilled citizens that could become entrepreneurs. Yet, these nascent entrepreneurs observe entrepreneurial factors that deter them from becoming self-employed. European entrepreneurship fails to reach its full potential. This thesis examines the factors that deter European potential entrepreneurs, as well as the factors that cause the difference between the prosperous entrepreneurial environment of the United States and Europe’s entrepreneurial environment. European entrepreneurship is considered to be lagging behind compared to American entrepreneurship (Audretsch, Thurik, Verheul, & Wennekers, 2002). To enhance entrepreneurial activity within the European Union the European Commission has created two main acts: In 2008 they released the “Small Business Act” and in 2013 this was followed by the “Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan”. These acts are reviewed in this thesis and compared to entrepreneurial factors found in corresponding literature. The main conclusion of the thesis is that the “Small Business Act” and the “Entrepreneurship 2020 Action Plan” will, to some extent, suffice in the creation of a prosperous entrepreneurial environment. But the EC has neglected to include some factors that may be of importance, such as improvement of European IPR and facilitation of employment laws for SMEs. However, the fragmentation within Europe is the primary problem that the EC experiences which disables them to enforce their proposed policies.