The Human-Centered Entrepreneurship Index (HCE Index) measuring human flourishing and entrepreneurial dynamism

Entrepreneurship and human well-being have been measured through separate cross-national systems for more than three decades. While both domains are well developed, they have not been integrated into a single framework for examining their relationship at the country level. This article introduces the Human-Centered Entrepreneurship (HCE) Index. This integrative framework establishes the first operational bridge between the Gallup World Poll and the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) at the population level. The index combines a human flourishing pillar with an entrepreneurial activity pillar, capturing innovation, risk taking, and proactiveness from GEM data, and explicitly treats the opportunity-versus-necessity distinction. Across 43 economies, high levels of human flourishing and opportunity-driven entrepreneurship rarely occur together. Most countries exhibit imbalance, performing strongly on one dimension while remaining constrained on the other. The contribution is not the index but the integration it makes possible, challenging a long-standing assumption: that more entrepreneurship automatically leads to better human outcomes.