WELL-BEING OF ENTREPRENEURS - INTERNATIONAL COMPARISON BASED ON GEM DATA

Abstract

Purpose: Entrepreneurs start up their businesses for a variety of reasons. Among those are self-fulfi llment and expected increase in quality of life. The paper aims at measuring the diff erence of well-being of entrepreneurs and non-entrepreneurs in cross-country analysis. Also presented are results for entrepreneurs at various stages of activity, opportunity entrepreneurs and necessity ones and female and male entrepreneurs. Methodology/approach: Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) data is used to test the hypoth-eses. In 2013 there was a special topic in GEM concerning well-being and quality of life. The sample of 70 countries taking part in GEM is used. To test the hypotheses the dependent samples t-test is used. Findings: Research results show that well-being of entrepreneurs is higher than of non-entrepre-neurs, well-being of owners of established businesses is higher than of early-stage entrepreneurs, well-being of opportunity entrepreneurs is higher than of necessity entrepreneurs and that there is no statistically signifi cant diff erence between well-being of female and male entrepreneurs. Implications/limitations: The study has implications for quality of life research by indicating some of the factors that infl uence the well-being of people involved in business activity. The limitation of the study is using country as the level of analysis instead of using data at individual level that was not available at the time of conducting the research. Originality/value: Some of the relationships presented in the paper have not been researched yet. The main value of the paper is taking the next step in uncovering the patters of well-being of