Un análisis espacial del emprendimiento en Chile. Más no siempre es mejor

Abstract

The promotion of entrepreneurship has become one of the main policies of the Chilean development strategy in the last decade and has been considered as a means to improve local development. This article uses an occupational definition of entrepreneurship to analyze whether the increase in the number of entrepreneurs without taking into account its spatial dimension is an appropriate policy. For this purpose, we study the municipal location patterns of entrepreneurs in 2009 and 2011 with information from the Socioeconomic Characterization Survey (casen). The results show that it is not appropriate to talk about an entrepreneurship revolution in Chile. Furthermore, the analysis of spatial patterns and entrepreneurship clústeres reveals high heterogeneity among local areas according to the characteristics of their entrepreneurs. In this context, national entrepreneurship policies exclusively oriented to the increase in the number of firms could perpetuate spatial inequality.