The aim of the study is to investigate whether the interplay between entrepreneurial intentions and self-efficacy depends on gender. As males still dominate worldwide in entrepreneurial activity, the authors are interested in the specifics of female entrepreneurship and its antecedents. The central hypothesis was that female students have lower self-efficacy than male students which induces lower intentions towards venture creation. To follow the research aims, the authors conducted a questionnaire among students at one of the Polish universities. It included questions relating to the concept of self-efficacy inspired by the works of Bandura (1977, 1982, 1986, 1989), Noble et al. (1999) and Boyd and Vozikis (1994). By using various statistical methods (including the two means t-test, the coefficient of correlation test, the Chi-squared independence test and the Mann-Whitney U test) the interplay between intentions, gender and self-efficacy was investigated. According to the findings, the level of entrepreneurial intentions is gender-dependent and men present higher intentions towards venture creation than women. However, entrepreneurial self-efficacy proved to be not related to gender and self-efficacy is not a major factor shaping entrepreneurial intentions. The reason for lower intentions among women is not significantly connected with their self-efficacy. The paper discusses the contextual meaning of the results and their implications for entrepreneurship education in Poland.

Abstract

The aim of the article is to work out a synthetic measure for estimating country's innovation potential (CIP) of EU economies. For the purpose of the research, data from the European Statistical Office (Eurostat) are used and several indicators are organized by four different areas of analysis, i.e. investment expenditure, education, labour market and effects. Applying multi-dimensional statistics allows us to reduce the primary set of diagnostics variables and, simultaneously, identify those which best describe the potential. The final step is linear ordering of EU countries according to their innovative potential on the basis of CIP synthetic measure. The rating is compared with other ratings based on the recognized Summary Innovation Index and Global Innovation Index. The main conclusion is that the methodology of innovativeness assessment remains an open issue and requires further research. The most important task is the selection of indicators, followed by statistical verification in relation to their importance to innovativeness. The results show that there is a tendency to between the author's ratings and other already published ratings of innovativeness.

Scanner data offer new opportunities for CPI or HICP calculation. They can be obtained from a wide variety of retailers (supermarkets, home electronics, Internet shops, etc.) and provide information at the level of the barcode. One of advantages of using scanner data is the fact that they contain complete transaction information, i.e. prices and quantities for every sold item. After clearing data and unifying product names, products should be carefully classified (e.g. into COICOP 5 or below), matched, filtered and aggregated. One of new challenges connected with scanner data is the appropriate choice of the index formula. In this article we present a proposal for the implementation of individual stages of handling scanner data. We also point out potential problems during scanner data processing and their solutions. We compare a large number of price index methods based on real scanner data sets and we verify their sensitivity on adopted data filtering and aggregating methods. One of the aims is also to compare calculations of multilateral indices in terms of how time-consuming they are. Finally, the paper investigates distances between these indices and the theoretical, expected value of the price share when prices are log-normally distributed. It is a new approach to providing an additional criterion in the price index selection.

In the age of globalisation, implementation and commercialisation of new technologies are perceived as key elements determining competitiveness of particular countries, therefore, the growth of innovativeness is seen as the predominant direction of European Union society’s transformation into information society. The aim of the paper is to propose a procedure of measurement of innovativeness growth over time, with the Summary Innovation Index (SII) methodology as a starting point. The considered issue can be expressed by the following main question: how to measure the innovation performance dynamics for a selected group of countries (such as the EU-28, EU-15 or EU-13 countries) and for time intervals (not only for two moments of observations). This is an important inquiry since well-known innovativeness indices (SII, GII, or IOI) concentrate mainly on the provision of information about countries’ innovation performance for a specific year of observations. Due to this fact, changes occurring over longer time periods are rather neglected. The main result of the paper is a proposition of average innovativeness growth index. The index uses weights describing the employment share of a selected group of specialists (e.g.: scientists and engineers, research and development personnel) in relation to the economically active population.