BEYOND STARTUP BIRTHS: FORMAL ENTREPRENEURIAL-SYSTEM RESILIENCE THROUGH LLC REGISTRATION, DEREGISTRATION AND REGISTRY STOCK AFTER GLOBAL SHOCKS, 2006-2024. CROSS-COUNTRY REGISTRY EVIDENCE WITH NIGERIA IN COMPARATIVE PERSPECTIVE

Abstract

The sharp rise in company registrations after the pandemic raises a simple question: did formal entrepreneurship renew, or did startup births merely rebound? We examine the eighth edition of the World Bank Entrepreneurship Database for 2006-2024. After removing 29 offshore financial centres and standardising economy names, the panel covers 160 economies and contains 2,493 economy-years of new limited-liability company (LLC) registrations, 1,664 observations on formal deregistrations and 1,789 on registered LLC stock. Each outcome is expressed per 1,000 working-age adults. The analysis distinguishes four features of resilience: resistance at the onset of the shock, recovery among economies in which entry density fell in 2020, renewal against an economy-specific pre-pandemic trend, and consistency between registry flows and stock. Evidence comes from paired shock comparisons, Kaplan-Meier estimates, constant-sample checks, alternative trend windows, a placebo forecast and 4,999 nonparametric resamples. Median entry density declined by 6.2% between 2008 and 2009 and by 4.2% between 2019 and 2020. For the 107 economies observed at all four endpoints, however, the median paired difference was 4.2 percentage points and its interval included zero. The two contractions therefore cannot be ranked with confidence. The equivalent deregistration difference was -28.6 points and its interval excluded zero. Of the 89 economies whose entry density fell in 2020, an estimated 50.0% had recovered by 2021, 67.1% by 2022 and 76.8% by 2024. Median entry density stood 16.2% above its 2019 level in 2022. By 2024, it was 7.5% below the path fitted over 2015-2019, although that result weakened when the longer trend window was used. Nigeria moved from 0.805 registrations per 1,000 working-age adults in 2019 to 1.115 in 2022, placing it 24.3%-39.5% above the two fitted paths. Since Nigeria reports no deregistration series and no stock observation after 2020, the evidence supports an entry-recovery claim, not a claim about the resilience of the wider entrepreneurial ecosystem.