Entrepreneurial opportunities in peripheral versus core regions in Chile

Abstract

Governmental policies tend to support and boost entrepreneurship in peripheral regions in many countries. This research revives the debate about specific regional policies designed to foster local new business creation, and the entrepreneurial framework conditions needed at the regional level for emerging regions such as Latin America. We applied one of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s methodologies, the National Experts Survey, to a sample of 695 key informants in Chile at eight regions of which six are classified as peripheral. Using non-parametric statistics we compared the differences between peripheral and core regions. The main results indicate that peripherally located entrepreneurship experts perceive their regions as in a worse position than centrally located experts in terms of finance access and physical infrastructure. On the other hand, the results indicate that peripheral entrepreneurship experts detect more market dynamism in their regions and surprisingly perceive general policy and government programs as supporting entrepreneurship although the Chilean government had not promoted many regional policies.