Uncovering Relations between Culture and Entrepreneurial Performance in Europe: Examples of How Correlations-Based Statistical Analyses May Increase Our Understanding

Although the European Union strategically supports entrepreneurship through different public policies, entrepreneurial performance varies significantly across Member States. This disparity suggests the need to investigate the underlying factors, in particular the influence of cultural differences. Culture influences economic and political values, but most current studies are limited to isolated dimensions of national culture. This fragmented approach fails to provide a rigorous and complete overview of the real cultural impact on entrepreneurial activity and especially on its performance. Using Canonical Correlation Analysis via R programming, we extract qualitative statements about the importance of cultural dimensions thus asserting functional connection to performance dimensions of Small and Medium Enterprises. A set of increasingly general statistical tests is deployed in order to increase the confidence in the non-random nature of the correlation structure found as well as in the validity of the qualitative statements announced in the first place. Starting out from two data matrices, the purpose of the present paper is to analyze the associations between cultural dimensions and the entrepreneurial performance dimensions of the European Union countries by means of correlation analysis, identifying the most significant pairs of variables that link culture and entrepreneurial performance. The novelty of the present research lies in the expansion of knowledge usable for reliably identifying “sensitive” pairs of cultural variables and entrepreneurial performance within the European Union. This offers a qualitative evaluation of the association between culture and entrepreneurial success based on data, thus explaining economic disparities despite uniform public interventions at European level.