Governmental venture capital policies are not all alike: design features in 11 European Countries

This descriptive study aims at examining to which extent, and by which means governments intervene in the private venture capital market. To do so, we present original primary data, hand-collected from the annual reports of 128 national and sub-national government agencies located in 11 European countries, and their 392 Government Venture Capital (GVC) programmes run over the 2007–2021 period. Our data confirms the importance of governments in the supply of VC, accounting for 30.9% of the total euro-amount of VC investments. It also documents a great deal of variation in the design features of GVC agencies (their ownership, experience, geographical focus, stated objectives and policy mix used) and their means of intervention (general investment approach, involvement of the private investors, budget organization and size, investment selection criteria), which was neglected by previous studies. We argue that the marked differences across GVC policies may explain why the existent evidence on whether GVC policies are effective is not clear-cut. We draw on existing literature discussing government intervention in entrepreneurial finance to reason on how each design feature might influence GVC effectiveness, and put forward several propositions calling for future empirical research to test them.