Dear Readers, we hereby present you with the sixth edition of the Report Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Poland, prepared by the Polish Agency for Enterprise Development in cooperation with the University of Economics in Katowice, following the international GEM project methodology. The Report describes entrepreneurship in Poland in comparison to other countries, yet unlike other similar publications, it focuses on people and their environment rather than on registered business entities. Owing to this approach, the Report provides knowledge that allows readers to better understand the processes governing business activity in Poland.

What does the Report tell us about entrepreneurship in Poland? Undoubtedly, 2016 was the best of the last six years in terms of pro-entrepreneurial attitudes of Poles. The number of Poles declaring their willingness to set up a business is nearly twice as high as the EU average; in addition to that, more of us think that they have the relevant qualifications. 2016 saw a significant increase in the number of Poles considering their environment as business-friendly. In 2016, the slowdown in negative trends concerning the image of an entrepreneur in the Polish society was also confirmed, along with an improvement in the indicator reflecting the involvement of public media and Internet in communicating entrepreneurship-related content

Consequently, the ratio of people starting their own business and running it for up to 3.5 years reached its record high of nearly 11% of adult Poles, whereas the EU average is slightly below 9%. For the first time since the beginning of GEM research, the percentage of people setting up new businesses in order to exploit the opportunities that running one’s own business offers exceeded 50% (reaching 52%). The fact that this indicator is crucial for the quality of entrepreneurship is confirmed by its inclusion into the EIS innovation index.

What is especially interesting is the increasingly widespread phenomenon of a growing percentage of Polish women who see business opportunities in their environment and that deem their skills sufficient to do business. Currently, 39% of Polish women think that there are opportunities to set up a business in their environment, whereas in 2015, this point of view was shared by 32% of them. Moreover, 54% of women believe that they are prepared to run their own business, whereas last year this number amounted to 48%.

The assessment of conditions for setting up and development of newly set-up businesses prepared by an expert group and presented in this Report is positive in terms of access to technical infrastructure. The experts believe that high market dynamics are also beneficial for the development of businesses. According to them, there is room for improvement especially in the areas of entrepreneurship-related education and administrative burden.

Since 2016, an improvement in the conditions for setting up and running business activity has been one of the priorities of the Polish government. 2017 saw the implementation of most elements of the “100 changes for business” package, e.g. under which the Code of Administrative Proceedings was amended. Another package of modifications, the “Constitution for Business”, adopted by the government in November 2017, creates favourable and stable conditions for running a business and reinforces guarantees of entrepreneurs’ freedoms and rights.

In the next years, the effects of these initiatives should be positively reflected in statistics and in society, entrepreneur and expert opinion surveys that we monitor under the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor project.