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The purpose of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor(GEM) is to build and enhance global understanding about the attitudes, activity, and aspiration of entrepreneurs. By providing greater knowledge about entrepreneurship, GEM can help governments, businesses, and educators around the world design policies, develop programs, and provide assistance to help these enterprising individuals thrive in an increasing global business environment. GEM is a consortium of national academic teams and a central coordination team. Working together, this consortium administers an adult population survey(APS) of at least 2,000 individuals from 18-64 years old in each participating country. In addition, GEM conducts National Expert Surveys (NES) of at least 36 experts, to provide information about particular factors impacting entrepreneurship in each country. The analysis of NES was based on the answers from 62 experts in the 9 specified fields. GEM is a leading research program in the field of entrepreneurship, since it was suggested by Michael Hay, London Business School, UK, and William Bygrave, Babson College, USA. In the first year of the program, 1999, only 10 countries of US, Canada, UK, France, Germany, Japan, Italia, Finland, Israel, and Denmark were analyzed. The number of participating countries has grown since that time and reaced to 54 in 2009. This report organizes the 54 countries into three groups based on different economic development levels: factor-driven, efficiency-driven, and innovation-driven. Korea is among the 20 higher-income innovation-driven economies. Many of the comparisons made in this report with respect to Korea are within this group of countries. Korea ranked 8th in the TEA level in the group. Among the nations with higher level of TEAs are UAE, Iceland, and Greece, who have been experiencing severe economic distress after the global financial crisis. This shows higher TEAs do not imply better economic conditions, as is shown in the fact that Japan, also belonging to innovation-driven economy, has the lowest level of TEA(3.3%). The APS survey was conducted in May 2009, when the effects of global credit crisis were severely spread out almost all over the world. In entrepreneurial attitude, few Koreans see good opportunities for launching a business in the next six months, and few believe they have the skills to start a business. At the same time, Koreans saw entrepreneurship as attractive, had low fear of failure, were highly likely to indicate they expected to start a business in the next three years, compared to other innovation-driven economies. In measuring entrepreneurial activity, GEM includes four phases: potential, nascent, new, and established entrepreneurs. This report focuses primarily on nascent and new entrepreneurs, which make up the Total Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) rate. This rate in 2009 was 7% of the adult population in Korea, which were lower than 10% of 2008. Especially the decline of TEA rate were made more sharply among men than women. Both the necessity- and opportunity-based entrepreneurial activities felt down, the degree of decrease were relatively large in the latter (from 5.8% in 2008 to 3.7% in 2009) compared to the former (from 4.0% in 2008 to 3.1% in 2009). The rate of business discontinuation is the highest in Korea, relative to the other innovation-driven countries. One distinct quality of entrepreneurship in Korea is the ratio of male to female participation in entrepreneurship. While this varies among countries across the entire sample, the innovation-driven countries generally have a male-to-female entrepreneurship ratio of two to one, with some (U.S., Germany) having a much lower ratio. Korea, however, has about a three-to-one ratio. The ratio in TEA ( 10.4% of men to 3.5% of women) is almost the same as that in SEA(0.6% of men to 0.3% of women). Another prominent characteristic describing Korean entrepreneurs is the comparatively high level of education they have achieved, particularly graduate experience. In terms of aspirations, entrepreneurs in Korea, along with a few other countries, were pursuing higher levels of growth with their businesses. However, they were less likely to indicate their products embodied a high level of innovation (new product-market combinations). In addition, they only reported a moderate level of internationalization. The environment of informal investments in Korea is not so satisfactory, for its average score of 2.29 ranked 15th from the below among the 40 nations surveyed. The ratio of the informal investment to GDP in Korea is lower than 1%, as was discovered in Japan and Malaysia, which shows a conspicuous difference to 11% of China. Like other countries like US and UK severely affected by the global economic crisis, there is some evidence of a reduction in informal activity in Korea compared to 2008 too. Reports from the National Expert Survey reveal that availability of funding is a challenge for entrepreneurs, which is generally a concern for all the innovation-driven economies. Experts in Korea regard great the role of government in promoting entrepreneurial activities and agree that entrepreneurship is a priority for government, and this can be reflected in the variety of government programs initiated to promote entrepreneurship, including the establishment of technology incubators. In 2009, Korean government made a decision to enlarge the size of the government-aided funds for the private venture capitals, and the ratio of funds raised from government side reached more than 80% in Korean venture capital funds. A special topic of 2009 GEM project was Social Entrepreneurship Activity(SEA). Generally SEA level tends to increase as the stage of economic development evolves, as the SEA ratios discovered in factor-, necessity-, and innovation-driven economy are 1.4%, 1.8%, and1.9% respectively. The Korean number recorded just 0.7%, which is not only far lower than the average of the total nations, but also even the lowest except for Hong Kong and Spain. While male and female SEA ratios in innovation-driven countries are 1.2% and 0.7% respectively, Korea have much lower level of 0.6% and 0.2%. The higher the education level rises, the more Korean people participate in social entrepreneurship activities in order to address social and environmental problems.