Which countries are a) best and b) worst in terms of the population's dependendence on government/ independence from government, and how does this relate to creativity and innovation (performance)?
A difficult but important question Bernard@. I know of work which looks more generally at government's influence and the type of entrepreneurship. The classic is of course Baumol's 1990 - destructive entrepreneurship. I have a paper with Sana Harbi that is a little more up to date. We look at 'insitutions' rather directly at government
El Harbi, S. and Anderson, A.R., 2010. Institutions and the shaping of different forms of entrepreneurship. The Journal of socio-economics, 39(3), pp.436-444.