SYRIANS HIBA ALBASSIR and her husband Khaled arrived in Germany two years ago with only the bags they could carry. But that didn’t stop them from setting up their own business.

    For them, it was natural to rebuild the company they had left behind, whereas among many Germans this entrepreneurial spirit is in short supply.

    “Starting with nothing is not very easy, but just sitting around and doing nothing is much harder,” said 48-year-old Albassir whose company Khashabna, meaning “Our Wood” in Arabic, sells hand-made garden furniture imported from their former warehouse in Damascus.

    The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor finds that despite a recent startup boom in certain areas such as Berlin, Germany still has a relatively low level of entrepreneurial activity compared with other industrialized economies.

    Statistics show that the overall number of companies founded each year has shrunk by more than 40 percent over the past decade and that the entrepreneurial activity of young people has decreased as a long-term trend.

    With good jobs relatively plentiful, many German-born graduates prefer the greater safety of working for an established company rather than taking the risk of setting up on their own, said Rolf Sternberg, professor for economic geography at the University of Hanover.

    “In Germany, the culture prevails that if you fail, it’s not easy to shake off the stigma,” said Sternberg.

    Michael Huether, head of Germany’s IW institute, warns that a lack of high-tech startups and a tendency toward risk aversion could hurt economic growth in the medium-term.

    Breakthrough innovations are almost always made by startups or young, rapidly growing companies. Established corporations often have little interest in innovating, so as not to devalue their investments in existing technologies, Huether said.

    Countries, which historically have a large number of immigrants such as Australia, Israel and the United States, have higher rates of entrepreneurial activity.

    During the 1960s and 1970s, German industry recruited large numbers of “guest workers” from Turkey, North Africa and the former Yugoslavia. However, as technically temporary residents, they came to work in low-skilled jobs at German firms and not to establish new businesses.

    This time, the latest influx of refugees, many of whom ran a business back home, is seen as an opportunity to make Germany more enterprising.

    Migrants are already responsible for one in five new businesses set up in recent years, according to KfW, a government-owned development bank. This is higher than their share of the population.

    Around a third of those who applied for asylum last year came from Syria, where a culture of entrepreneurship is widespread. The biological father of Steve Jobs, who co-founded Apple, emigrated to the United States from Syria.(SD-Agencies)