What We Count and What We Miss: A Data Agenda for Youth Entrepreneurship in Asia-Pacific

By Dr. Ulrike Guelich, Assistant Professor, Bangkok University School of Entrepreneurship and Management, and Research Team Leader, Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) Thailand

We cannot improve what we do not measure, but measurement is never neutral. For rural and informal youth entrepreneurs across Asia-Pacific, visibility can be as risky as it is enabling. After a decade of ecosystem building, we have more data than ever on youth entrepreneurship. Yet our diagnostics remain fragmented. We know how many young people intend to start businesses. We know far less about what happens to them afterwards.

What Has Changed

The past decade has brought real progress. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM)  and UNDP now provide reliable cross-country data on youth attitudes, fear of failure, and early-stage entrepreneurial activity. A 2018/19 UNDP-GEM special topic report established the first regional baseline, showing where young people see opportunities, where fear stops them, and how patterns differ by gender and age.

Thailand’s GEM data, collected annually since 2011 from 2,000 adults, shows that 78% perceive good business opportunities, while 49% report fear of failure. We now understand entrepreneurial intentions better than ever before.

But these datasets remain siloed. GEM measures intentions and early-stage activity. National registries track formal startups. Investor databases capture deals. What we still cannot do is trace a single youth-led venture across its lifecycle - from intention to registration, from first sale to survival beyond three years.

What Is Still Missing

 My work with GEM Thailand and a regional UNDP study, alongside the Youth Co:Lab Strategic Intelligence Brief, highlights six data gaps for inclusive youth entrepreneurship. Four are particularly urgent.

First, survival and longitudinal tracking. We measure entry into entrepreneurship far better than exit. In Thailand, the  business closure rate rose to 9.8% in 2025, yet no system tracks whether youth-led ventures fail at higher rates or why. Without longitudinal data, we cannot distinguish between healthy experimentation and structural exclusion - nor assess whether support programmes extend survival.

Second, limited impact data on interventions. Governments and donors invest millions in incubators, training schemes, and challenge funds. Yet few systems evaluate whether these programmes improve survival, growth, or profitability - and for whom. Without linking programme participation to business outcomes, evidence-based policymaking remains constrained.

Third, insufficient gender-disaggregated finance data. Perception data is relatively strong; capital flow data is not. My research on Thai entrepreneurs shows that 55% of established women entrepreneurs report fear of failure, compared to 47% of men - likely reflecting unequal access to capital, weaker safety nets, and higher unpaid care burdens rather than psychological differences. Regional instruments include some gender-disaggregated indicators. What remains largely absent is youth-specific finance data at the point of loan origination, such as interest rates, collateral requirements, approval rates, and applicant age. These data are rarely collected systematically.

Fourth, systematic undercounting of informal, rural, and non-tech youth enterprises. Ecosystem mapping continues to prioritize capital-city, tech-enabled ventures. Yet across Asia-Pacific, 66% of employment remains informal, representing 1.3 billion workers, and more than 80% of enterprises operate informally. Formal business registries therefore miss the majority of entrepreneurial activity by definition. In Thailand, 39% of early-stage entrepreneurs introduce products new to their local area - not globally novel, but locally transformative. These ventures are often rural, non-tech, and female-led, and largely invisible in official statistics.

Two additional gaps deserve attention.

Data on social and environmental entrepreneurship remains limited, despite youth-led ventures playing a growing role in climate adaptation, waste management, and sustainable agriculture. As the green transition reshapes regional economies, the absence of systematic data on youth climate ventures risks misdirecting support.

Finally, we lack governance models that ensure data serves young entrepreneurs themselves. Measurement too often flows upward to donors and ministries rather than back to founders. Without youth co-governance in data design and interpretation, diagnostics risk reinforcing rather than correcting blind spots.

What Is Next

 The next decade requires stronger data systems, not more disconnected data collection. The returns are clear: every USD 1 invested in data systems yields approximately USD 32 in economic returns. UNDP has already called for national statistical systems to evolve from ‘data producers’ to ‘data coordinators’. Four actions follow.

To policymakers:

Mandate public dashboards tracking (1) enterprise registrations by age and gender; (2) survival rates at 12, 24, and 36 months; and (3) capital accessed, disaggregated by source and gender. Design must ensure methodological rigor to avoid performative counting.

To ecosystem builders:

Collect data that serves founders, not donor reports, real-time diagnostics on barriers facing rural and non-tech youth.

To investors:

Require gender-disaggregated portfolio reporting. Support for young women entrepreneurs must be measurable in capital allocation.

To UNDP and Youth Co:Lab:

Use the next funding cycle to pilot linked data across three Asia-Pacific countries, starting with Thailand (where GEM Adult Population Survey  data has been collected annually since 2011), plus two additional GEM-active countries. The pilot could:

1. Match GEM respondents with business registries to measure conversion from intention to registration within 12 months;

2. Track a cohort of youth-led early-stage entrepreneurs over 24 months to measure survival and exit reasons by gender and rural/urban location;

3. Develop a low-cost protocol to collect gender-disaggregated finance data at loan application or grant disbursement.

 Any linked-data component requires robust privacy governance, including anonymization and country-level ethics approval in line with applicable national data protection laws.

This is not a billion-dollar infrastructure project. It is a structured learning exercise producing a public methods guide -what works, what fails, and at what cost- enabling replication across the region. UNDP’s role is convening and catalytic seed funding, not building a regional database. Crucially, pilots should embed youth co-governance so young entrepreneurs shape what data is collected, how it is interpreted, and who accesses it. That is what “data that serves founders” means in practice.

The foundation of Asia-Pacific’s youth entrepreneurship ecosystem is in place. The next decade requires installing the sensors. Without them, we will continue supporting what is visible - and missing what matters most.

About the Author

 Ulrike Guelich is Assistant Professor at Bangkok University School of Entrepreneurship and Management and the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) Thailand research team leader. Her research focuses on women's entrepreneurship, entrepreneurship education, and the entrepreneurial mindset for sustainability.