A willingness to take risks and a desire to make decisions are the basic requirements for starting a business. Germany is not a land of entrepreneurs.
According to Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), an annual joint publication of the University of Hannover and the Institute for Jobmarket and Career Research of the German Federal Agency for Employment, only 2.5% of adults in Germany started a business which they could live from. This placed Germany in spot 10 of the 22 compared.
Rolf Sternberg, an economist, considers one reason for the weak culture of entrepreneurship to be the widespread desire toward security:
“The tendency to strive towards security is much more prevalent in Germany than in Anglo-American countries”. This is the flipside of having a well-developed social security system.
Yvonne Stolpmann of Chamber of Commerce in Nürnberg summarizes the situation as such: “Those who give up a permanent position here stand to lose a lot of security. It’s different in the USA”.