Abstract. The wealth of nations differs significantly due to different factors. One of the reasons identified by previous studies is the level of entrepreneurship promotion by governments. This aspect has scarcely been studied empirically to date. Therefore, this paper sheds some light on this regard through building a construct out of ten Ease of Doing Business Index (EDBI) measures developed by the World Bank and relating it with a construct shaped by two measures of socio-economic wealth (SEW), namely gross domestic product and the Human Development Index. To this end, we conduct a structural equation model analysis using partial least squares (PLS-SEM) method with a 2018 database comprising secondary data from 190 countries. As the main contribution of this study, the results show that good performance in the EDBI ranking predicts good performance in the SEW ranking. Additionally, this study is pioneer in the use of these rankings to build composite constructs (latent variables) and relate them. For these reasons, our findings are useful for both academia and governments responsible for promoting entrepreneurship, as this latter is identified as the key enabler of economic development.

中文翻译：

---

营商便利度是否可以被视为国家社会经济财富的预测指标？使用PLS-SEM的经验分析

摘要。由于不同的因素，国家的财富差异很大。先前研究确定的原因之一是政府对企业家精神的促进程度。迄今为止，几乎没有从经验上对此方面进行研究。因此，本文通过建立由世界银行制定的十项经商便利性指数（EDBI）措施中的一种结构，并将其与由两项社会经济财富（SEW）形状构成的结构相关联，对此进行了说明。即国内生产总值和人类发展指数。为此，我们使用包含190个国家/地区的次要数据的2018年数据库，使用偏最小二乘（PLS-SEM）方法进行了结构方程模型分析。作为这项研究的主要贡献，结果表明，EDBI排名中的良好表现预示了SEW排名中的良好表现。此外，这项研究是利用这些排名构建复合结构（潜在变量）并将其关联的先驱。由于这些原因，我们的发现对于学术界和负责促进企业家精神的政府都是有用的，因为后者被认为是经济发展的关键推动力。