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.
News
- The World Bank’s 10th annual Women, Business and the Law report suggests that ending discriminatory laws and practices that prevent women from working or starting businesses could raise global GDP by more than 20% (Reuters)
- South Africa’s minister of small business development Stella Ndabeni-Abrahams is set to host GEC+Africa next week in Cape Town, convening over 1,500 entrepreneurs, investors, policymakers, researchers and ecosystem leaders from 50 African countries (South African Governmen)
- India has reversed its AI stance, with deputy IT minister Rajeev Chandrasekhar issuing an advisory that requires “significant” tech firms to get government permission before launching new models (TechCrunch)
- The Netherlands has launched a secret taskforce to keep chip giant ASML – Europe’s most valuable tech company – in the country (TNW)
Publications & analysis
- Policy on a spectrum: Guiding technology regulation through value tradeoffs
This Atlantic Council report seeks to distill complex interactions between technology and society into a comprehensive framework. - From migrant worker to owner: When temporary migration is used to start one’s own business
This CEPR column co-authored by representatives of the World Bank and Bocconi University shows that the majority of Bangladeshi migrants take on significant financial burdens to cover migration costs, but can enjoy high returns that are used to start small businesses when they return home. - Europe’s DMA rules for big tech explained
This TechCrunch column details the newly-implemented EU digital markets act and its early impacts on the six “internet gatekeepers”: Alphabet, Amazon, Apply, ByteDance, Meta and Microsoft. - All In: Female founders in the European VC ecosystem
PitchBook has released European and U.S.-focused reports examining trends surrounding VC-backed companies founded and/or led by women European report | U.S. report
Comment
- MENA startups in 2024 (Philip Bahoshy, founder, MAGNiTT)
- The current SBA administrator is the best ever - here’s how she can be even better (Gene Marks, founder, The Marks Group)
- What an American approach to AI regulation should look like (Paul Scharre, vice president and director of studies and Vivek Chilukuri, senior fellow and program director, Center for New American Security)
- The WTO extended a moratorium on digital trade tariffs. Here’s why it will help innovation and productivity (Michele Ruta, lead economist, World Bank and Tibor Hanappi and Adam Jakubik, economists, IMF)
- Europe’s Digital Market Act goes global (Bill Echikson, non-resident senior fellow and Maria Hadjicosta, intern, Center for European Policy Analysis)
Features
- TechCrunch: Inside the weird and quirky world of building a startup behind a wall of tariffs
- Politico: The EU’s uphill battle against big tech power
- TechCabal: Why Malawi’s nascent tech ecosystem is ripe for growth
To suggest content for inclusion in future editions of 'The Startup State', please email matt@genglobal.org.
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