Entrepreneurship in Serbia

Abstract

Entrepreneurship development in Serbia since its creation until today has been passing throughout a number of rises and downs. An analysis of the influencing factors of economic and entrepreneurship development will be divided into three phases. The first phase is covering the period from sixth to seventh centuries when the Serbs settled the Balkan Peninsula until getting independency from the Ottoman Empire in 1878. The second phase will cover the period until the end of World War Two while the third phase will cover the period during comunism regime in the former Yugoslavia and transition period to modern Serbia. Over the past two decades, since 2000, the increasing contribution to national competitiveness of Serbia has been provided by small and medium-sized enterprises and entrepreneurs (SMEs). The subject of this chapter is the analysis of the SME sector and the business environment in Serbia and the examination of the impact of the SME sector on national competitiveness. The aim of the research is to analyze the influencing factors of the development of entrepreneurship in Serbia through its history from the sixth century to the present day. The starting assumption of the study is that the SME sector has had a significant impact on national competitiveness of Serbia. In order to verify the validity of this assumption, the relationship between the total number of SMEs (based on the data of the Business Registers Agency) and the national competitiveness of Serbia (based on the Global Competitiveness Index) in the period from 2004 to 2015 was first examined. Then we analyzed the impact of individual segments of SMEs businesses on national competitiveness in order to identify the areas of business where the link with national competitiveness was the strongest. For the analysis descriptive statistics, correlation and regression analysis have been used. It has been proven that the SMEs sector had a significant impact on Serbia’s national competitiveness in the observed period and that the link between these variables was statistically significant, so that the conclusion could be generalized and same trends could be expected in the future. As the most important segments of SMEs’ operations affecting national competitiveness, productivity of labor and participation of SMEs in export have been highlighted.