Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyse if the divergences in the economic growth of the Spanish regions are a result of sectoral differences, company size or technological level of the new firms that emerge in the market. Design/methodology/approach: For this purpose, a model is specified and estimated in which the total factor productivity of Spanish regions is explained by business dynamics, innovation, human capital and the level of entrepreneurship in each region. Findings: The results obtained lead the authors to conclude that entrepreneurship understood as both the creation of new firms and entrepreneurial activity, have a positive effect on productive efficiency and can explain the differences in the economic growth of the regions. In addition, the stock of human capital and the promotion of innovation act as catalysts for the productive efficiency of the regions. However, the results show that it is not enough to generate new firms to boost economic growth; these businesses must also be oriented towards sectors that promote technological innovation and with the objective to reach an adequate size. Originality/value: Empirical studies use either the creation of new firms or the index of entrepreneurial activity as alternative measures of entrepreneurship. In this research, however, both variables are considered together. Specifically, the creation of new companies is used as a measure of regional business dynamics, and the entrepreneurial activity index, provided by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, as a measure of regional entrepreneurship. The main novelty of this paper’s approach is that it considers different types of entrepreneurial capital in considering productive sector, size and technological level of the new companies.

The importance of intangible capital as a driver of productivity growth is recognised at both macroeconomic and microeconomic levels. However, in general, there is a lack of strong empirical evidence in the relevant literature on the connection between micro and macro approaches. This study integrates both perspectives to analyse how internal and external intangible capital influence the productivity of companies and, therefore, economic growth. A model is estimated in which the total factor productivity of companies is explained through their internal and external intangible capital. To this end, regional characteristics are considered in terms of technological endowment, human capital, and entrepreneurial capital. In addition, other agglomeration economies such as regional specialisation and regional productive diversity are also considered. In the empirical application, a panel of companies from the seventeen Spanish regions over the period 2006–2015 is used. The findings suggest that there is a positive effect of intangible capital on companies’ productivity and evidence of a spillover effect as a result of local intensities of intangibles.

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to analyse the gender differences of self-employment in Spain. Design/methodology/approach: A binary choice model is specified and estimated, using information from the Continuous Working Life Sample drawn from the registers of the Spanish Social Security. Moreover, the differences in self-employment between men and women are also analysed, through the decomposition proposed by Yun (2004). Findings: The results indicate that the differences between both groups in the probability of being entrepreneurs stem from unobservable factors. The difference explained by the unobservable component is 84.12 per cent, whereas the rest, 15.88 per cent, is explained by the characteristics component. The explanatory factors of being an entrepreneur affect men and women in the same way, but to a different extent, explained mainly by factors related to gender. Originality/value: This paper sets out to identify whether there are gender differences in the probability of becoming self-employed and, if there are, to quantify what part of the difference in entrepreneurship between men and women is explained by the characteristics of each gender group and what part is because of unobservable factors. From the perspective of the public authority, knowing the determinants that explain why the entrepreneurial activity is different depending on gender is fundamental in being able to reduce the entrepreneurial gap between men and women.

This paper proposes a generalisation of the regional extraction method used by Dietzenbacher at el. [(1993). The regional extraction method: EC input–output comparisons. Economic System Research, 5(2), 185–206. https://do.org/10.1080/0953-5319300000017]. The production system represented by an input–output table is broken down into three flow matrices: intermediate input, final demand, and value added. The approach of Dietzenbacher et al. [(1993). focuses on the input matrix to obtain both the backward and forward dependencies. The present paper, offers an alternative approach includes the final demand matrix to calculate the backward dependencies, while the value-added matrix is included for the forward dependencies. These two approaches are then compared by applying them to the empirical data based on the EUREGIO database. The results indicate that the Dietzenbacher et al. approach underestimates the dependencies, and the difference between these two approaches could lead to a different ranking of the dependence of the regions.