This is how badly Germany performs when it comes to founding

The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor looked at 43 countries. Germany only ranks 41st in the start-up rate.

Germany is not the country where starting a business is particularly attractive. In an international comparison by the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), Germany ranks 41st out of 43 countries in terms of the start-up rate. In this country, only 4.8 percent of 18 to 64-year-olds have founded a company in the last three years. Angola took first place, with Poland and Italy bringing up the rear behind Germany. For the Monitor, 135,942 people and 1,821 start-up experts were surveyed in 43 countries; 72 of the experts and 3,003 people came from Germany. The survey was conducted by the RKW Competence Center and Leibniz Universität Hannover on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Economics and Technology.

The founders rated the general conditions in Germany as good, with the country ranking in the middle of the field. However, access to capital is lacking: only around half of those surveyed say that they are provided with sufficient capital by investors. The other half rely on state aid. This can reach start-ups in the form of low-interest loans, for example from the KfW, or state guarantees. The German government also recently set up a future fund that aims to pay out ten billion euros to start-ups by 2030. Private investors will contribute another 20 billion euros. For the Federal Commissioner for Start-ups, Thomas Jarzombek (CDU), this aid is still not enough and he is calling for a second future fund worth 100 billion euros.

However, Germany is well positioned in terms of diversity, as the GEM shows: almost as many women as men founded a start-up, and the start-up rate in 2020 was higher for immigrants (5.6%) than for people born here (4.7%).