The Impact of Trust on Entrepreneurship in Poland

Abstract

In the global rankings of generalized trust, Poland occupies a lowly position. Only 1/3 of Poles have a strong trust in strangers and roughly the same number believe that trust in business generally pays off. At the same time, only half of them believe that a market economy based on private enterprise is the best economic system for the country. According to the literature review a major factor in the development of entrepreneurship is trust in other economic actors. The aim of the article is to present the relation between trust and entrepreneurial activities in Poland. In this paper the hypothesis was adopted that the level of trust in the public sphere, especially in business relations in Poland, had an impact on the intensity of entrepreneurial activities. The analysed period comprises the years from 2002 to 2016. The article presents changes in the potential for social trust, including trust in business. Indicators of confidence include the percentage of people that have trust in different actors in Poland. A further part of the paper is devoted to the phenomenon of entrepreneurship in Poland. Among the indicators of entrepreneurship are the number of newly registered and deregistered entities, and entities that are new or deregistered from the REGON register per 10 thousand of population. Moreover, the innovation activity of enterprises in Poland has been described. At the end, relations between trust and entrepreneurial activities in Poland were examined. The data was analysed statistically with Pearson’s correlation coefficients. The analysis of confidence and entrepreneurship is based mainly on the data published by the Polish Central Statistical Office and Public Opinion Research Centre.