Measuring The Returns To Rural Entrepreneurship Development

Entrepreneurship has increasingly been held out as an alternative to traditional economic development strategies and policies. Advocates for entrepreneurship-based policies suggest that entrepreneurial development generates greater returns to the public than other alternative strategies such as industrial recruitment, or retention and expansion. This paper develops a conceptual basis for measuring the welfare consequences of economic development programs and policies in general, and entrepreneurship oriented programs in particular. Furthermore, it considers the special case of economic development policy when the spatial distribution of development is important.