Impact of the regional business environment on the development of small and medium-sized enterprises in Southern Poland

A good starting point to a discussion on regional factors as determinants for business success can be Tobler’s statement “Everything is related to everything else, but near things are more related than distant things” (1970, p. 234). It is a paradigm, that some regions have a more entrepreneurial attitude than others. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) finds considerable differences in entrepreneurial attitudes between countries (Acs et al. 2004). German scientists found that these attitudes vary also in regions within one country (Bergman, Japsen & Tamásy 2002). Studies of different regions in reference to enterprise start-up’s can explain that differences are due to a large extent to the differences in socio-demographic variables and the regional industry structure. Entrepreneurial attitudes are to some extent dependent on the region of origin, but a number of questions concerning the regional influence still remain unresolved in a theoretical and empirical way (Bergman 2002), and this was the inspiration for conducting this research.