Liberalization of European Telecommunications and Entrepreneurship: Why German and Portuguese Experiences are so Equal and so Different?

The paper aims to investigate the impact of the liberalization of European Telecommunications Markets, on the Business Ownership Rate, the Employment, the Gross Domestic Product, and the Investment in ICT, in two European countries: Germany and Portugal. For this purpose, a Cointegrated Vector Autoregressive (CVAR) approach is developed, in order to identify the impacts that are originated from the adoption of this kind of public policies. In the case of Germany, a surprising causality relationship is detected, in the sense that Gross Domestic Product precedes decreasing Business Ownership Rates. In the case of Portugal, the Business Ownership Rate pulls for additional investments in ICT. Besides, a creative entrepreneurial destruction is somehow ratified, since the Business Ownership Rate impacts, negatively, on the level of employment.