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Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to focus on the relationship between corruption and productive entrepreneurship in general and whether it depends on countries’ specific characteristics in particular. Design/methodology/approach – The authors used a unique data set of entrepreneurial activity within 176 countries, collected from the professional networking site LinkedIn. The authors used OLS regression to estimate the level of entrepreneurship. The main independent variable was the CPI score (Transparency International). In addition, two sub-samples were used, 70 less-developed countries and 34 OECD countries, and numerous control variables. Findings – The paper makes three important contributions to the field. First, it proposes worldwide empirical evidence that countries with high levels of corruption usually face low levels of productive entrepreneurship. Second, the paper suggests that the negative effect is much more significant in developed countries than in developing countries. Third, the paper explores whether the negative effect of corruption depends on country-specific economic characteristics. Research limitations/implications – While there is significant value in using LinkedIn data in entrepreneurship research, there are limitations to this database. Therefore, significant robustness tests were employed and further research, for instance using longitudinal LinkedIn data, could be valuable. Moreover, using different entrepreneurs’ data sets might increase the validation of the results. Finally, further examination of the influence of corruption on different types of entrepreneurial activities and their interaction with different characteristics of the country is still required. Originality/value – The results stress the need to fight corruption not only in developing countries and suggests significant gains from anti-corruption efforts even and maybe especially in the western developed world.

This paper provides an account of the emergence and development of a Venture Capital Industry in Israel, and the role it played in the recent successful growth of Israel's high tech cluster. The paper focuses on Israel's Venture Capital Industry, its emergence and operation during the 90s, in which period the number of VC Funds increased from 2 to over 100. The context is the transformation of Israel's high tech industry from the Defense-dominated Electronics industry of the 70s/80s to the 'Silicon Valley' model of the 90s characterized by large numbers of SU companies. During this period the share of high tech in manufacturing industry; and ICT's share in the Business Sector increased considerably attaining one of the highest levels worldwide. Given the importance of Venture Capital an analysis of the waves of new SU companies should be done jointly with an analysis of the emergence and development of Venture Capital (and vice-versa). The approach adopted is Evolutionary & Systemic rather than a focus on 'the operation' of a mature Venture Capital industry, which has been more frequent in the VC literature. We focus on the Dynamics of Venture Capital particularly of the emergence and of subsequent development of the industry. We link these with core Evolutionary concepts such as variation, selection and reproduction (Nelson 1995). The paper discusses the co-evolutionary and dynamic process involving the business sector, technology policies, venture-capitalists, individuals & Startup companies, and foreign linkages. We attempt to show that VC emergence is part & parcel of the reconfiguration of a pre-existing Electronics Industry one involving large amounts of SU and new and powerful links with global capital markets. The main conclusions and policy lessons of the paper are that specific technology policies targeted to the Venture Capital sector can be effective only to the extent that favorable background conditions exist or are created. The main groups of factors, events or sub-processes influencing the emergence process which started in 1993, and subsequent development, are: (1) favorable background conditions; (2) features of the immediate pre-emergence period (1989-92); (3) Targeted Policies which directly triggered VC Emergence (1993-98); (4) Strong VC-SU co-evolution; (5) Global Capital Market Links.Venture capital, Start-up, High-tech cluster, Emergence, Evolutionary,

Targeting, Evolutionary economics, Innovation and technology policy, Emergence, Infant industries, Industrial policy, O38, O25, O14, L78, L26, L52, L53,