Welcome to ‘The Startup State’ - a weekly bulletin from the GEN Policy and Research team highlighting key entrepreneurship news, reports, commentary and features from around the world.
GEN Atlas insights
The GEN Atlas is the world’s largest entrepreneurship policy compendium, featuring over 350 case studies from 70 countries. This week’s spotlight is the first in a series examining finance policies, starting with co-investment schemes. Read the spotlight
News
- The European Union has settled on how to determine the job status of ride-hailing drivers and food delivery bike couriers after two years of negotiations. The deal could classify some of these workers as employees instead of independent contractors, granting them more social rights and benefits (Politico)
- Central Asia and Mongolia will benefit from a €200m ($218m) youth entrepreneurship program funded by the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development. Up to one-third of the population in the region is aged between 18 and 34 years (EBRD)
- South Africa is experiencing a surge in cryptocurrency options as it approaches issuing its inaugural operational licenses for financial service providers. Over 128 applications have been submitted to date (TechInAfrica)
- Australia has launched an immigration strategy that seeks to halve migration intake while encouraging highly-skilled talent. The strategy will allow VC-backed startups to sponsor workers under a new specialist skills visa with a seven-day processing time (Strategy | Smart Company summary)
- Bhutan has officially exited the UN list of least developed countries. Since the 1980s, Bhutan has sustained an average annual real GDP growth of 7.5% while life expectancy increased from 47 to 68 years. In 2021, the country became the fastest place in the world to register a small business (UNCTAD)
Publications & analysis
- State of UK deep tech
This Royal Academy of Engineering report examines the UK deep tech ecosystem. It finds 3,462 deep tech companies, which attracted £5.22bn ($6.62bn) funding in 2022. Cleantech and AI dominate the sector. Only 17% are university spinouts. On gender, only 15% of founder teams are mixed gender and just 7.5% are founded solely by women. - Learning by investing: Entrepreneurial spillovers from venture capital
This working paper by Josh Lerner (Harvard), Jinlin Li (Harvard) and Tong Liu (MIT) studies how investing in venture capital affects the entrepreneurial outcomes of individual limited partners in China. - SME policy index: Eastern partner countries 2024
This OECD and EBRD benchmarking tool assesses and monitors progress in the design and implementation of SME policies in Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Modova and Ukraine against EU and international best practice. - The index of state dynamism
This Economic Innovation Group report uses eight core measures to track three decades of economic change across America. The ISD captures the intrinsic vitality of an economy: how quickly it changes, how efficiently it redeploys its resources to the most productive use, and how successfully it translates experimentation into opportunity. Summary
Comment
- Reforms give Ethiopia’s startup scene a fighting chance (Andrew Christian, writer, Bendada)
- How can universities increase diversity in spin-out founders? (Prof Simonetta Manfredi, director of research & innovation, Oxford Brookes University)
- Multilateral development banks can bridge the trust gap between emerging economies and private investors (Christian Kleboth, head of debt mobilisation, European Bank for Reconstruction and Development)
- How Southeast Asia can become a $1 trillion digital economy (Sapna Chadha, vice president, South East Asia and South Asia frontier, Google)
Features
- Statecraft: How to use challenge prizes
- Benedict Evans: AI, and everything else: Macro and strategic trends in the tech industry
- GovTech: California welcomes 21st century auto startup boom
- TechCabal: Algeria wants to drive tech investments, but it must first open up
This is the final newsletter of the year. The Startup State will return on 5th January.
To suggest content for inclusion in future editions of 'The Startup State', please email matt@genglobal.org.
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