Attitude of university students toward entrepreneurship environment and toward entrepreneurship propensity in Czech Republic and Slovak Republic–International comparison

Abstract

On the basis of online survey (made in 2017) about entrepreneurship environment we wanted to find out which entrepreneurship conditions are different from the viewpoint of Czech university students (156 men and 252 women) and Slovak university students (216 men and 352 women). From 40 available questionnaire items about two-thirds of them were different in a group of Czech university students compared with Slovak university students (p < 0.05). Czech university students trust more in: entrepreneurial support from the state, macroeconomic environment, quality of entrepreneurship environment and quality of university education compared with Slovak students. In contrast, Slovak students are more optimistic about the image of entrepreneurs in the media, about personal attributes for entrepreneurship, about career growth in entrepreneurship and are more ready to start entrepreneurship after graduation. CART decision tree was used for the multivariate classification problem between Czech university students and Slovak university students. A final CART decision tree model involved only four questionnaire items. Two of them were related to rather macroeconomic conditions - “Legal conditions for doing entrepreneurship are of high quality” and “I consider the macroeconomic environment of my country to be positive for entrepreneurship”. These items were significantly more positively accepted in a group of Czech university students. The other pair of involved items was concerned with personality traits - “Every person has certain prerequisites for entrepreneurship” and “The most important characteristics of an entrepreneur are specializsation, persistence, responsibility, and risk-resistance.” They were more valued in the case of Slovak university students. Average correct classification rate of CART decision tree model with four mentioned items was 71.0%. © 2019, © 2019 The Author(s). Published by Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group.