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In the development literature, some countries are cited more often than others as examples of development success. These countries are understood to have policies and institutions in place that could be transferred, at least in part, to less successful countries both within their own regions, and elsewhere in the world. As such, they may constitute ‘role models of development’. This scholarly volume contains historical accounts of a select set of successful countries in the developing world; successful by virtue of their growth and development path — albeit at times in an uneven, non-linear, and patchy manner. Each unique case describes the fundamental ‘causes’ of success: initial conditions and resources; local, regional, and international factors shaping the national state of affairs; contributions to the development process by internal and external actors and institutions. Each country has a story to tell from where useful lessons can be drawn. While other similar works have presented cases of successful development strategies, they tend to be region-specific or constitute a relatively small number of cases. This book takes a more wide-ranging perspective involving a large number of country studies, spanning world regions and development levels.

Why are some individuals more entrepreneurial than others? What types of institutional environments are more conducive to entrepreneurship? Does entrepreneurship contribute to the growth of a country? Answering these questions is particularly important at a time when governments all over the world are looking to entrepreneurship as a way to increase employment and the competitiveness of their countries. The chapters in this volume cover topics such as entrepreneurial motivation, gender and migration, entrepreneurial financing, urban entrepreneurship, growth-oriented entrepreneurship, economic growth, and regional entrepreneurship policies. Each chapter is based on data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor. The GEM project collects detailed and comparable data on representative population samples in more than 60 countries. No other existing book provides such a coherent global view of entrepreneurship and its implications. Other studies use a hodge-podge of data from different sources to study entrepreneurship. The data used to support the different parts of a given argument are not always consistent with one another or easily compared. The scientific validity of such empirical findings is limited as the various pieces of evidence do not belong to the same puzzle. Therefore, the coherence of a universal approach is lost and important aspects of the entrepreneurial process may be overlooked or undervalued. This volume, on the other hand, tests all theoretical arguments against the same empirical data, all the pieces fit into the same puzzle and a coherent and unitary picture of entrepreneurial activity, from its causes and motivations to its macroeconomic impact and implications, emerges.

In the development literature, some countries are cited more often than others as examples of development success. These countries are understood to have policies and institutions in place that could be transferred, at least in part, to less successful countries both within their own regions, and elsewhere in the world. As such, they may constitute ‘role models of development’. This scholarly volume contains historical accounts of a select set of successful countries in the developing world; successful by virtue of their growth and development path—albeit at times in an uneven, non-linear, and patchy manner. Each unique case describes the fundamental ‘causes’ of success: initial conditions and resources; local, regional, and international factors shaping the national state of affairs; and contributions to the development process by internal and external actors and institutions. Each country has a story to tell from which useful lessons can be drawn. While other similar works have presented cases of successful development strategies, they tend to be region-specific or constitute a relatively small number of cases. This book takes a more wide-ranging perspective involving a large number of country studies, spanning world regions and development levels.

This edited book will make an important, timely, and innovative contribution to the now flourishing academic discipline of political leadership studies. We have developed a conceptual framework of leadership capital and a diagnostic tool—the Leadership Capital Index (LCI)—to measure and evaluate the fluctuating nature of leadership capital. Differing amounts of leadership capital, a combination of skills, relations, and reputation, allow leaders to succeed or fail. This book brings together leading international scholars to engage with the concept of “leadership capital” and apply the LCI to a variety of comparative case studies. The LCI offers a comprehensive yet parsimonious and easily applicable ten-point matrix to examine leadership authority over time and in different political contexts. In each case, leaders “spend” and put their “stock” of authority and support at risk. United States president, Lyndon Johnson, arm-twisting Congress to put into effect civil rights legislation, Tony Blair taking the United Kingdom into the invasion of Iraq, Angela Merkel committing Germany to a generous reception of refugees: all ‘spent capital’ to forge public policy they believed in. We are interested in how office-holders acquire, consolidate, risk, and lose such capital. This volume concentrates predominantly on elected ‘chief executives’ at the national level, including majoritarian and consensus systems, multiple and singular cases. We also consider some presidential and sub-national cases. The purpose of the exercise is indeed exploratory: the chapters are a series of plausibility probes, to see how the LCI framework ‘performs’ as a descriptive and analytical tool.