Abstract
Every year, news about the publication of rankings and scores of important international indexes are highlighted, with some of the most prestigious being the Global Competitiveness Index (GCI), the Human Development Index (HDI), the Ease of Doing Business (EDB), the Environmental Performance Index (EPI) and the Global Entrepreneurship (GEI). A country’s progression in these indices is associated with economic growth, especially since several empirical studies have found evidence to reinforce these beliefs, the indices having been built based on the scientific literature on economic growth. Building a database on these indices for European Union countries between 2007 and 2017 and using panel data methodologies and then 2SLS (Two-Stage Least Squares) to solve the problem of endogeneity, we verify empirically through panel data estimates, what is the relationship between the mentioned indices and the European Union countries’ economic growth for the period. However, as the European Union is made up of diverse countries with different economic and social realities, we divided the countries into six clusters and made an individual interpretation for each one. We found that human development and competitiveness play an important role in economic growth, and entrepreneurship also impacts this growth. Regarding income distribution, applying the Gini index, we found that only human development mitigates inequalities.
Highlights
The economic growth of nations has always played a major role in politics and scientific publications
In cluster one, we find that entrepreneurship takes on statistical significance and has a positive coefficient for economic growth; in cluster two, this importance is shared by Human Development and Ease of Doing Business
In terms of the effects on economic growth, the panel data model, estimated using the fixed effects methodology, presents four variables with statistical significance, namely, Global Competitiveness Index (GCI), Human Development Index (HDI), Environmental Performance Index (EPI), and Global Entrepreneurship Index (GEI), with the HDI variable being the one with the highest impact on GDPpc
Summary
The economic growth of nations has always played a major role in politics and scientific publications. In this way, for many decades, researchers have tried to find variables that influence economic growth. For many decades, researchers have tried to find variables that influence economic growth On this subject, hundreds of empirical studies have been published, some of the time reaching different results. The Global Competitiveness Index (ICG), prepared by the World Economic Forum, aims to measure the competitiveness of countries. The Human Development Index (HDI), prepared by the United Nations, aims to quantify the human development of the countries considered. The Global Entrepreneurship Index (GEI), published by GEDI (The Global Entrepreneurship and Development Institute), is intended to quantify how entrepreneurial a country is
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