UK ranked 8th best country for starting a business

The UK ranks eighth of 137 countries globally for being a “welcoming place to start a business” and fifth out of 41 countries in Europe, the new Global Entrepreneurship Index 2017 from Global Entrepreneurship Week (GEW) reports.

With an overall score of 71%, this ranking puts the UK among the top 10 places across the world to start a business but the report has called for more to be done to improve the country’s enterprise culture.

The report – produced by The GEDI (Global Entrepreneurship and Development) Institute – found that, if the conditions for entrepreneurship were improved by just 10%, the UK economy could receive a $460bn boost.

This links to a study it ran which found that entrepreneurship correlates with making a country rich; the more developed a country’s enterprise community is, the greater a country’s GDP is likely to be.

The United States took the top spot in the index for being the best place to start a business globally with a score of 83.4%, followed by Switzerland (78%), and Canada (75.6%).

In terms of sector strengths, the UK was found to be strongest in technology absorption and providing cultural supprot while Chile ranked highly for start-up skills, Israel for risk capital, and Switzerland for internationalisation. America was found to be strong in opportunity perception.

The UK’s weakest area was found to be networking.

Jonathan Ortmans, president of the Global Entrepreneur Network, commented:

“Thanks in part to programmes like Global Entrepreneurship Week and Startup Weekend, the last 10 years have delivered a huge global army of enthusiastic nascent entrepreneurs organised in vibrant communities – but policymakers have been slower in responding. Early adaptors such as Airbnb and Uber disrupted long-standing traditional industries while local, state and federal policymakers around the world were caught off guard in understanding the public policy implications of such dramatic innovation.

“This is just the tip of the iceberg of the digital disruption revolution unfolding.

“Creating a new generation of globally competitive traditional industries will require a willingness of companies to either self-disrupt or deeply engage with the novices working on doing what they do better, faster and cheaper. In addition, it will require a whole new approach from government.”