Entrepreneurship and Economic Growth.

This article concentrates on a problem which so far has received only little attention by economists, the role of human resources in the process of economic advancement of underdeveloped areas. This topic has formidable proportions and cannot be treated in full within the framework of this paper. The author confines his remarks, therefore, to a specialized point, the place of entrepreneurship in economic development, and hopes to show, at least by implication, some of the more general problems arising in a consideration of the role played by human factors of production in the process of economic development. A study of economists' opinions on entrepreneurship leads to strange and sometimes contradictory results. Some writers have identified entrepreneurship with the function of uncertainty-bearing, others with the coordination of productive resources, others with the introduction of innovations, and still others with the provision of capital. It is probably true that at different times and under different institutional conditions each of these aspects may have constituted the primary, or at least socially most significant function, of entrepreneurs, and this function was then selected as typical and regarded as the unique contribution of entrepreneurs in the process of production.