Research on index construction of sustainable entrepreneurship and its impact on economic growth

Abstract

Based on the triple bottom line of sustainable development, sustainable entrepreneurship has been well studied; however, the existing literature on the measurement of sustainable entrepreneurship is still limited. This paper attempts to quantify sustainable entrepreneurship through three indicators, innovative spirit, entrepreneurial spirit and decision-making spirit, and constructs a new time-varying index of sustainable entrepreneurship by the time-varying coefficient state space equation model. Applying the new time-varying index, this paper studies the impact of sustainable entrepreneurship on Chinese regional economic growth and explores the role of technical R&D and financial intermediary development in the path of influence. The empirical results show following conclusions. First, sustainable entrepreneurship promotes regional economic growth. Second, there exists a positive mediation effect of sustainable entrepreneurship influencing regional economic growth through technical R&D. Third, financial intermediaries have a positive effect on sustainable entrepreneurship, and they play a moderating role in the first half of the path through which sustainable entrepreneurship affects regional economic growth through technical R&D.