Ch. 5 - Evaluating How the Regulatory Ecosystem Promotes Entrepreneurial Activities in Africa

International audience In Sub-Saharan Africa, and globally, entrepreneurship is renowned as an important engine of growth and economic development. In this chapter, we use Operations Research models to study how public institutions encourage entrepreneurship. We present a case study where Principal Component Analysis (PCA) and Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) methodologies are applied to evaluate the impact of government regulations on the creation of new businesses. We use data from the Doing Business (DB) project of the World Bank for 40 African economies during the period 2014–2018. We propose seven novel composite evaluation measures. Using correlation and consistency analysis, we validate the proposed measures by comparing them to the Start a Business scores from Doing Business. Our subsequent analyses provide relevant robust comparisons and rankings of African economies and allow the identification of best-performing countries in our sample.