Book excerpt: This brief presents a detailed look at the entrepreneurial ecosystem of nations around the wold by combining individual data with institutional components. Presenting data from the 2017 Global Entrepreneurship and Development Index (GEDI), which measures the quality and scale of entrepreneurial process from 137 countries world-wide, this book provides a rich understanding of entrepreneurship and a more precise means to measure it. In addition to yearly data and comparison, this 2017 edition also explores the digital entrepreneurial ecosystem and provides a detailed analysis of two measurements of entrepreneurship: the GEDI and the Total Early-Stage Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) measure. Whereas developed countries will be challenged to increase their economic productivity to sustain current standards of living as their populations rapidly age, developing economies will need to integrate more than two billion young adults into the world economy by 2050. How can more than one billion jobs be created in the developing world within this timeframe, especially in the least developed countries, where poverty and massive unemployment are already dominant facts of economic life? How can we measure, monitor, and build the ecosystems to produce such growth? The GEDI is designed to profile national systems of entrepreneurship. It links institutions and agents through a National Entrepreneurial System (ecosystem) in which each biotic and abiotic component is reinforced by the other at the country level. The resulting data gives policymakers a tool for understanding the entrepreneurial strengths and weaknesses of their countries’ economies, thereby enabling them to implement policies that foster productive entrepreneurship. The GEDI also helps governments harness the power of entrepreneurship to add these types of challenges.