THE ECONOMIC ENVIRONMENT AS A PREDICTOR OF ENTREPRENEURIAL INTENTIONS

The goal of the paper is to examine the influence of the economic environment of the individual’s place of origin on the intensity of entrepreneurial intentions which are seen in the desire to start an entrepreneurial venture. Economic factors primarily mean the economic development of a certain area, which in the present study is expressed as the size of GDP. The study’s respondents were students who had enrolled at the Republic of Croatia’s higher education institutions where the study programmes are focused on some of the forms of entrepreneurial education: entrepreneurship, economy, and management. According to the data provided by the Agency for Science and Higher Education, in the academic year 2017/18, the total number of students enrolled in study programs relevant to research was 3768.The research was conducted on a sample of 690 students, which makes the sample size 18.31% of the total number of enrolled students. For the empirical part of the paper, the anonymous survey method was used, while different statistical methods were used to analyse the results of the survey, such as the Regression analysis, Pearson correlation coefficient, and the t-test. The conducted study proves that the level of development of the economic environment directly influenced the entrepreneurial intentions of the respondents. Entrepreneurial intentions represent the intensity of aspiration and how much an individual wants to start their entrepreneurial venture. Certain individuals might have the desire to become an entrepreneur, but multiple factors affect whether they will start their venture. It is a long way from desiring to implementing the entrepreneurial idea that initially appeared as an entrepreneurial intention. Multiple factors and determinants guide someone’s behaviour, and the intensity of the influence is different for each determinant.