Since the entrepreneurial and creative spirit function plays an important role not only in private business but also in the public sector, this paper aims at investigating the relationship between entrepreneurship, innovation and public sector performance. Using composite indicators, the present paper examines in a comparative way the performance of the public sector of the EU countries in relation to the degree of innovation and entrepreneurship. Emphasis will be on the new states that joined the EU (in 2004 and in 2007), during the period 2000-2009. The most important result of the paper shows that the performance of public sector indicator and the innovation index are directly related: the higher the degree of innovation, the higher the public sector performance. Also, we show that the most innovative countries (Sweden, Denmark, Finland, and the Netherlands) exhibit also a higher performance of the public sector. Romania, along with Lithuania, Latvia, Bulgaria, has a low degree of innovation, and thus a poorer performance. Based on these results, we argue that by joining Eastern European countries to the European Union, they have assumed overall EU innovation policy in order to achieve a high degree of sustainable development, but their problems related to clustering, networking and coordination prevent them from reaching a high level of innovation. At the same time, the capital deficiencies that characterize developing countries, expressed through a low degree of interpersonal trust, cooperation and lack of initiative have a negative impact on creativity and entrepreneurship.
