Defining and Measuring Entrepreneurship reviews the most common concepts of entrepreneurship from the theoretical economics literature, identifying common elements and pointing to important differences. The purpose is to compare these theoretical ideas of entrepreneurship with the measures used in empirical country-level studies. Since a coherent or unifying definition of entrepreneurship has not emerged, the authors explain that it is important to be precise about the relationship between the different theoretical aspects of entrepreneurship and the empirical measures. This is revealed by comparing entrepreneurial activity across OECD countries using measures that reflect different theoretical aspects. Based on various data sources, the relative ranking of countries is very sensitive to the empirical measure used.

定义和衡量企业家精神回顾了理论经济学文献中最常见的企业家精神概念，确定了共同要素并指出了重要差异。目的是将这些企业家精神的理论观点与国家实证研究中使用的措施进行比较。由于还没有出现一个连贯或统一的创业定义，作者解释说，准确把握创业的不同理论方面与实证措施之间的关系很重要。这一点可以通过使用反映不同理论方面的指标对经合组织国家的创业活动进行比较来揭示。根据各种数据来源，各国的相对排名对所使用的经验衡量指标非常敏感。