There is a a clear negative relationship between deprivation and start-up rates.
It is clear ... that there are challenges in Scotland’s entrepreneurial ecosystem, so understanding what might be impacting this is important. We know from prior literature that start-up is difficult and deprivation plays a role in this in both real and perceptual terms.7 What our analysis raises is the role of additional considerations that the effects of deprivation may have on starting up – we know that deprivation has a deleterious impact on mental health and in turn we are seeing from our analysis that poor mental health affects start-up rates. There is not a simple solution to this – poverty reduction is a key goal of most Western governments and Scotland is no different. Reduction of poverty does and should take precedence over starting up, but the consequence of reducing poverty is likely to be an increase in start-up rates so there is a possible additional benefit to making this happen.