According to the Global Entrepreneurship and Development Institute (GEDI), a non-profit organisation that advances research on links between entrepreneurship, economic development and prosperity, the countries which saw the biggest increase in the number of start-up last year were Iran, Latvia and Greece with growth percentages of 12, 11 and 10 per cent respectively.

The report also indicates that the countries with the sharpest and steady declines in start-up numbers were the Nordic states of Denmark, Finland, Sweden and Norway, which have lost an average of nine points over the last seven years.

You don’t have to be an expert on entrepreneurial issues to detect the trend here as the correlation is quite obvious — the poorer and more challenged economic environments of crisis-stricken Greece and sanctions-hit Iran have been more conducive towards the creation of budding entrepreneurs when compared with the economically and politically stable and rich Scandinavian countries.

As unemployment soared in Greece, the most driven — or desperate — individuals decided to risk their savings in order to enter the world of entrepreneurship by starting up their own businesses. On the other hand, up in the rich North, where unemployment is low and state benefits for those out of a job are high, people feel much less inclined to leave their comfort zone in pursuit of an entrepreneurial journey to the unknown.

But what would the potential implications be if this trend were to continue in the long term? Could we start seeing a surge of successful start-ups springing out from poverty-stricken countries, not through proper planning and by design, but purely out of necessity? Would it be likely that the next Nokia of the world won’t come out of Finland but instead pop up somewhere in rural Greece?

In theory, if the challenged economies continue to see this trend in the number of start-ups taking shape within their borders, we may be witnessing a paradigm shift in the origin of future cutting-edge innovations.

But for a theory to be proven it needs to be universal. The UAE, a country which has enjoyed decades of development, growth and prosperity and one with low unemployment was the world’s second biggest gainer in terms of start-up numbers last year and improving its global GEI position by 12.8 points, just behind the table topper, Greece.

However, the difference in the type of entrepreneurship between the two countries couldn’t be starker. On the one hand you have a government which struggles to make ends meet and a society which has lost over a quarter of its GDP during the last few years.

On the other you have one of the most prosperous economies with one of the world’s highest GDPs, a government that has been running surplus budgets for years and a model infrastructure.

So, while the majority of new start-ups in Greece are focusing on the so-called low-end sector of the economy, entrepreneurs in the UAE are targeting the type of knowledge economy businesses that the government itself has set its eyes on. The devil is always in the detail and although the GDI 2015 report captures a great deal of it in the form of numbers and percentages helping observers detect trends and visualise patterns, it leaves much to be desired in terms of credibility due to the fact that entrepreneurship is a multidimensional phenomenon whose exact meaning is difficult to identify.

Still, the Global Entrepreneurship Index is the first, and presently the only, complex measure of the national-level entrepreneurship ecosystem that reflects the multifaceted nature of entrepreneurship.

According to GEI, the MENA region in general performs close to the world average. Regarding the Index’s pillars of Opportunity, Perception, Networking, and Risk Capital, the MENA countries collectively perform better than the world average.

The most notable phenomenon to affect this region in recent years is the Arab Spring because it occurred as a reaction to the ruling elites’ monopolisation of opportunity in a number of countries in the region. In essence, Arab Spring did not begin as a cry for democracy but due to the exclusion of the majority of the population from the hope of opportunity which led to the suicide of the street vendor in Tunisia.

— The writer is an Omani entrepreneur and founder of www.arab-entrepreneurs.org. Follow him on Twitter @Qaisalkhonji