The 'entrepreneurial spirit' is so tough it can survive even if starting a business has been strictly illegal for 40 years.
In countries where private business was banned for decades under Communism, the grandchildren of pre-communist business owners are still 50% more likely to be entrepreneurs today. This suggests that the drive to start a business is passed down through genetics or informal family attitudes rather than through inherited wealth or existing family firms.
Intergenerational Transmission of Entrepreneurship from Before to After Communism
SSRN · 6464923
The tendency for children of self-employed to follow in their parents' footsteps is well-documented, but less is known about the mechanisms underlying this correlation: inheritance of a family business or wealth, direct learning-by-doing, or more general skills and preferences passed across generations. In this paper, we examine micro-data from seven countries (Hungary, Poland, Czechia, Slovakia, Bulgaria, Russia, and China) that experienced decades of central planning during which private busin