Which Local Governments Provide Suitable Promotion of Entrepreneurship?

Introduction

Every day, hour, minute and second that passes, present-day society increases in competitiveness, causing greater complexity of the labour market and consequently preventing the young population from finding employment. It is clear that self-employment or, in other words, the development of an entrepreneurial activity, can become an important tool to combat this series of problems. This undertaking is not an easy task and so requires a foothold. Local governments thus contribute to this work, since the development of entrepreneurial activity will cause a significant improvement in their locality. Traditionally, entrepreneurship has been related to the capacity that different individuals have in order to take advantage of certain business situations, gaining profitability in their development (Dimova and Pela, 2018). This identification of business opportunities usually causes entrepreneurship to be commonly associated with the face of business creation (Domenichelli, 2012), considered by some authors as the most appropriate method to analyse it (Gartner, 1990).

Undertaking this is a complicated task that requires the gathering of different knowledge by the entrepreneur, such as the operation of the sector where you want to invest, the knowledge of the financial system that surrounds you, or the possibility of obtaining financing, among others. In this case, the lack of information is one of the problems of development of their company which face entrepreneurs in a region (Carvalho, Pérez, and Pache, 2019). Therefore, the support that entrepreneurs receive during all the stages of their adventure will be decisive and must be provided by local governments in the first place “since they play an important role of support and promotion in the creation of companies” (Nevado, Gallardo and Carvalho, 2019, p. 98). On the other hand, these authors affirm that a very useful ally for the transmission of information is new technologies, especially the internet. In view of the above, and considering local governments as a fundamental support factor for entrepreneurial work, the objective of this study is to analyse the information they provide to entrepreneurs in their institutional web portals.

As regards the sample, the local governments of the Spanish provincial capitals were chosen of which, as established in article 141 of the Spanish Constitution, there are 50. To carry out our study we will use the content analysis technique, used in previous research (Moneva and Martín, 2012; Nevado, Gallardo and Sánchez, 2013; Beuren and Angonese, 2015; García-Sánchez, Frías-Aceituno and Rodríguez-Domínguez, 2013; among others). Data collection was carried out through access via search engine of the home page of each local entity between the months of January and April 2015, collecting information related to entrepreneurship. To provide this information, the indicators proposed by Carvalho, Gallardo and Nevado (2018) were used, comprising a total of 49 indicators grouped into 5 dimensions. With the information collected, information disclosure indices are prepared in order to obtain the degree and type of information they disclose. The results show that the local governments of the capitals of Spanish provinces offer information to entrepreneurs through their websites; however, the degree of information they disclose is low. Attending to the results of this study we are able to conclude that information disclosure is related to the communication with entrepreneurs and are scarce the information provided about resources and active entrepreneurship. This chapter is divided in introduction, literatura review about entrepreneurship, methodology, results, final remarks and new avenues for future research.