Starting up a business down under

A NEW report by PricewaterhouseCoopers (PWC), a professional-services firm, suggests that Australia could start a lot more businesses. It predicts that high-tech start-ups could account for 4% of GDP and 540,000 jobs by 2033, up from 0.1% of GDP and 9,500 jobs today. The report offers signposts as to how the country might shift from mining coal to mining data. Australia has about 1,500 tech start-ups, mostly in Sydney and Melbourne. Vast untapped opportunities await in health care, an industry that will surge as the nation ages. Australia’s regulatory environment for entrepreneurs is friendly, and the country is admirably open to skilled immigration. In an annual survey of global entrepreneurship, 54% of adult Australians said they were interested in starting their own business, compared with nearly 70% of Italians. But 19% of Australians actually began the process, the highest proportion of the 21 countries in the report, whereas only 3% of Italians did so. Nonetheless, PwC frets that “fear of failure” is more common in Australia than in America or Canada, and this could be holding it back. See full article.