## 1 Introduction  
One of the main problems of economies is to determine the factors that can enhance their development and national competitiveness and sustain economic growth. Entrepreneurship was considered an important determining factor because it: (i) contributes to the economic development of countries and the well-being of society [1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7], having a differentiated impact depending on the degree of development of the economy [8, 9, 10]; (ii) is the engine of economic growth, contributing to the creation of new jobs and the generation of new employment opportunities [11, 12]; (iii) stimulates competition [13] and competitiveness [14, 15, 16]. Entrepreneurship is the heart of innovation, productivity growth, competitiveness, economic growth and job creation [17] and is one of the main public policy issues [18, 19]. Starting from these statements, our study comes as a complement to the literature that has analysed the relationship between entrepreneurship, competitiveness and economic growth. In the literature, the fact that entrepreneurship is an important factor that can sustain economic growth and can increase the competitiveness of a country was highlighted. However, we have changed the direction from which we look at things and we considered that not only the effective number of entrepreneurs is significant to the economy but their quality and performance. Therefore, in this paper, we intend to analyse things in more depth and to point out that not only quantitative indicators measuring entrepreneur are significant for an economy but more so the quality and the level of entrepreneurial performance. The database was created by collecting data for a set of indicators that measure entrepreneurial performance for a sample of 27 European Union countries, for a period of twelve years (2008-2019). We also collected data regarding economic growth and national competitiveness. In the following, we applied econometric models to identify the relationship between variables. We tested several regression models to identify the one that best suited our sample. The novelty of our study derives from the inclusion in the analysis of several indicators measuring the entrepreneurial performance. Previous studies have considered only quantitative indicators of entrepreneur, so the inclusion in the analysis of a set of indicators that measure the performance of entrepreneur is something new. The indicators considered for our analysis were selected from the set of relevant indicators recommended by the OECD-Eurostat Entrepreneurship Indicators Programme (EIP) [20]. The Entrepreneurship Indicators Programme aims to develop a list of indicators and standard definitions and concepts to facilitate the collection of statistics on entrepreneur [21]. We chose the EIP because it is the only one that proposes a complete and complex set of indicators and expresses several aspects of entrepreneurial activity: firms' dynamics on the market, employment and the wealth of firms. Only a minimal number of studies from the literature have focused on analysing some of these indicators that measure entrepreneurial performance. Another element of novelty of this study is the fact that we perform a comparative analysis of the relationship between entrepreneur performance, competitiveness and economic growth by groups of EU countries depending on their stage of economic development. We chose a comparative analysis because we want to identify whether the relationship between performant and successful entrepreneur and the development of economies, expressed by national competitiveness and economic growth, is different depending on the stage of economic development of the countries. Our paper complements the literature in the field by pointing out the need for researchers to focus more on indicators that measure the quality and performance of entrepreneur when analysing its relation with economic growth and/or national competitiveness of countries.