  Data collected through the National Expert Survey (NES) of the Global
Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) are widely used to assess the quality and impact
of national entrepreneurial ecosystems. By focusing on the measurement of the
National Entrepreneurship Context Index (NECI), we argue and show that the
subjective nature of the responses of the national experts precludes meaningful
cross-country analyses and cross-country rankings. Moreover, we show that the
limited precision of the NECI severely constraints the longitudinal assessment
of within-country trends. We provide recommendations for the current use of
NECI data and suggestions for future NES data collections.
