This paper is a review on the impact of entrepreneurship on regional economic development, entrepreneurship being considered an important source of growth at regional level, as the theoretical literature concludes. However, empirical research results show an unclear contribution of entrepreneurs to economic development. The challenge for the empirical literature is to find the right proxies for entrepreneurship to capture the main features of entrepreneurial behavior that drive the success of

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... siness and have the potential to impact the regional economy. The paper reviews the empirical literature focusing on indicators that measure entrepreneurship and on their capacity to include information about cultural background, risk attitude, innovative potential and mostly about the entrepreneurial environment seen as aspects that might influence the impact of entrepreneurship on regional economic development. Based on the theoretical background, we make a critical evaluation of the efficiency of the synthesized indicators to capture the essential aspects of entrepreneurship.