Entrepreneurial ecosystems in Italy

The main aim of this paper is to develop a measure of entrepreneurial ecosystems (ee) at local level. We select and aggregate into a composite index 13 variables that represent the different features of an ee. Data refers to Italian provinces (nuts-3 level) in the years 2004 and 2011. The ee index shows a large variation between Italian provinces but a high persistence over time. We analyse the consistency of the index to different weighting procedure, normalization and aggregation methods. We also check for the sensitivity of the index in ranking the provinces to the removal of each variable.