Transnational Diaspora Entrepreneurship (TDE) meets Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM): Preliminary results of an empirical attempt to measure TDE between countries

Transnational Diaspora Entrepreneurship (TDE) is still an under-researched topic. Although the phenomenon itself has already been in the world since decades, it gained additional importance in the context of globalisation. We define transnational diaspora entrepreneurs as first and second generation migrants being entrepreneurially active, who leverage ethnoscapes (and possibly technoscapes), utilize multiple socio-cultural resources and mobilize/augment resources from both ends of the migration corridor TDE could be relevant for regional development because precisely the flows of resources between migrations corridors can create positive externalities. The most common are the remittances but also other socio-economic mechanisms, like knowledge and human capital exchange. Given this interpretation of TDE, it is clear that there is a huge and still increasing demand both for empirical data on the extent of this social phenomenon across countries and for government policy attempts to steer these flows of entrepreneurs in favour of national or regional economies. In particular, there is a considerable research gap when it comes to empirical, standardized and comparable data regarding the extent of TDE for countries of different development stages, but also for relevant migration corridors between such countries. Following our presentation at MDE2015, we intend to provide a first attempt to measure TDE based upon a unique data set created in 2016 as part of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), the largest academic research consortium to empirically study entrepreneurship worldwide based in around 75 countries each year and since 1999. We will propose a methodology to identify transnational diaspora entrepreneurs by integrating specific questions in the annual Adult Population Survey of GEM 2016. Standardized and comparable data of about 15 countries will be used to present some preliminary, explorative and descriptive empirical insights into the amount of TDE within and between these countries. Data will include some socio-demographic characteristics of these TDE but more relevant, data will give parameters to identify the type of business and some additional measures of attitudes and aspirations. Since data conduction was performed within the unified and standardized GEM framework, this information will be comparable among different groups of entrepreneurs across participant countries. The research is part of the network DiasporaLink, funded by the EU (RISE program), see http://cordis.europa.eu/project/rcn/194325_en.html.