Working Paper
Finance, gender, and entrepreneurship
How does informal economic activity respond to increased financial inclusion? Does it become more entrepreneurial? Does access to new financing options change the gender configuration of informal economic activity and, if so, in what ways and what...
Working Paper
Industrial Policy
The debate on industrial policy (IP) has been characterized by a number of contractions over the concept of industrial policy, its merits, contents and application. The purpose of this exploratory paper is to review the debate on IP. Outlining the...
Blog
Youth Unemployment in the Arab World: What Do We know? What is the Way Forward?
by
Imed Drine
June 2012
Imed Drine Many observers see youth unemployment as the major reason behind the recent popular uprisings in a number of Arab countries. Increasing...
Working Paper
The Economic Legacy of Civil War
This paper positions itself among the very rare microeconomic analyses on the consequences of civil war. Up to now, most analyses on this topic are based upon household surveys. The originality of the present study is that it investigates for the...
Working Paper
Information, identification, or neither?
How can development programmes reach out to remote communities? This paper presents experimental evidence on the impact of a role models intervention that aims to inspire ethnic minority households to start businesses and diversify income sources...
Working Paper
Unlocking Public Entrepreneurship and Public Economies
Unlocking human potential requires a rich network of institutional arrangements in both private and public spheres. Opening the private sphere to entrepreneurship and complex market organization is well understood as a key to increasing the level and...
Working Paper
Entrepreneurship, Stages of Development, and Industrialization
Unlike in the past where industrial policy was either focused on creation and growth of state-owned firms or alternatively consisted merely of broadly functional policies without consideration for firm or entrepreneurial specifics, the requirement...
Journal Special Issue
WIDER Symposium on Adaptive Efficiency and Evolving Diversity of Enterprise Ownership and Governance
A property rights regime covers rights to use, lease, donate, bequest, and sell assets or collect the incomes generated by assets. A clear and transparent property rights regime facilitates investment and economic growth. While private property is...
Journal Special Issue
Entrepreneurship and Conflict
Entrepreneurs are often adversely affected by violent conflict such as civil war. At the same time though entrepreneurs may contribute to or even benefit from violent conflict and other ‘destructive’ and ‘unproductive’ activities that limit economic...
Journal Article
Benefits of Formalization
Based on unique panel data consisting of both formal and informal firms, this paper uses a matched double difference approach to examine the relationship between legal status and firm level outcomes in micro, small and medium manufacturing...
Journal Special Issue
Female Entrepreneurship Across Countries and in Development
In this article we provide an introduction to the papers in the special section of this edition of the European Journal of Development Research. We start by framing the challenges posed by female entrepreneurship to the research community, note some...
Working Paper
Young People, Agriculture, and Employment in Rural Africa
This paper examines the current interest in addressing the problem of young people’s unemployment in Africa through agriculture. Using notions of transitions and mobilities we set out a transformative work and opportunity space framework that...
Journal Article
Firm-Level Corruption in Vietnam
This article uses panel data from a survey of small- and medium-sized enterprises in Vietnam to uncover which firms pay bribes and which do not. We also study how bribe paying evolved between 2005 and 2007 and test how the determinants of bribes...
Journal Special Issue
Small Business, Entrepreneurship, and Violent Conflict in Developing Countries
This study surveys the small but growing field of entrepreneurship and conflict in developing countries, which is also the topic of this special issue of the Journal of Small business and Entrepreneurship. We review recent contributions on how mass...
Blog
Entrepreneurship in Iraq: Understanding the Constraints
by
Sameeksha Desai
November 2009
Sameeksha Desai Across countries, entrepreneurship is shown to support wealth and income generation, job creation and innovations in product and...
Blog
Conflict and Entrepreneurship in Afghanistan
by
Tommaso Ciarli, Saeed Parto, Maria Savona
November 2009
Tommaso Ciarli, Saeed Parto and Maria Savona Afghanistan remains one of the poorest countries in the world with an estimated per capita income of 300...
Blog
Can Entrepreneurship Make Peace Work?
Tony Addison and Tilman Brück There is a special role for entrepreneurship to play in making peace work. The recently published UNU-WIDER study...
Blog
Wealth Distribution, the Financial Crisis and Entrepreneurship
by
Wim Naudé, James C. MacGee
March 2009
Wim Naudé and James C. MacGee Globally, wealth is very unequally distributed, both within countries and between countries. The UNU-WIDER project on...
Policy Brief
Promoting Entrepreneurship in Developing Countries
This policy brief provides some fresh perspectives on the relationship between entrepreneurship and development, and considers policy design issues. It reports on the UNU-WIDER two-year research project 'Promoting Entrepreneurial Capacity', which...
Journal Special Issue
Entrepreneurship, Developing Countries and Development Economics
We are pleased to announce a Special Issue of the Small Business Economics Journal on Entrepreneurship, Developing Countries and Development Economics, guest edited by Wim Naudé. With more than a billion people living in absolute poverty it is of...
Working Paper
Breaking the metal ceiling
Occupational segregation significantly contributes to the earnings gender gap worldwide. We look at differences in outcomes for male and female enterprises and their sectors in Sub-Saharan Africa, a region of high female participation in...
Working Paper
Skills and Youth Entrepreneurship in Africa
The shortages of entrepreneurial skills have lowered search effectiveness of potential young entrepreneurs and the rate of youth start-ups. Our paper contributes to closing the gap in the entrepreneurship and development literature with a model of...
Working Paper
Capitalism and African Business Cultures
Scholars and practitioners once commonly linked ‘African culture’ to a distinctive ‘African capitalism’, at odds with genuine capitalism and the demands of modern business. Yet contemporary African business cultures reveal that a capitalist ethos has...
Working Paper
Private Returns to Education for Wage-employees and the Self-employed in Uganda
The paper investigates the differences in private marginal returns to education between wage-employees and the self-employed in Uganda, using the Mincerian framework with pooled regression models. We use a two-wave household panel to estimate...
Working Paper
‘Rushing in where Angels Fear to Tread?’
In this paper I empirically investigate the early international entrepreneurship of indigenous Chinese firms using data on 3,948 firms surveyed by the World Bank in 2002-03. I find important differences in the extent and motivation of early...
Working Paper
When to Start a New Firm?
The success of new start-up firms often depends on timing. It is valuable for the potential entrepreneur to wait for the right moment before starting a new firm. In this paper we provide a theoretical model to determine the optimal time for starting...
Blog
How American Capitalism Really Works: Some Lessons for Developing Countries
by
William Lazonick
April 2009
William Lazonick Defined as the act of forming a new business, entrepreneurship is viewed as a prime way in which individualism can contribute to...
Working Paper
How important are management practices for the productivity of small and medium enterprises?
Is the lack of ‘managerial capital’, alongside human and financial capital, a constraint on the growth of firms in developing countries? The evidence on this is still mixed, especially among small and medium enterprises. This paper uses a panel of...
Working Paper
Entrepreneurial Ventures and the Developmental State
A basic intellectual challenge for those concerned with the poverty of nations is to come to grips with the nature and causes of the wealth of the world’s wealthier nations. One might then be in a position to inform the poorer nations how they might...
Working Paper
Peace, Prosperity, and Pro-Growth Entrepreneurship
Support for entrepreneurship is widely seen as a mechanism to facilitate prosperity and peace in a growing number of post-conflict states. In this paper I critically evaluate this view. I argue that entrepreneurship is a ubiquitous quality in post...