Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship

Entrepreneurship is now recognized as a strategy to achieve economic growth in many regions. The goal of this paper is to increase the understanding of entrepreneurship's contributions to economic growth and its potential as a development strategy for a region, such as Appalachia, characterized by poverty and underdevelopment. Using data on Appalachian counties, a system of simultaneous equations is empirically estimated to measure the effects of entrepreneurship on economic growth and development. An expanded Carlino-Mills growth model is used where changes in population, employment and per capita income represent measures of growth. Proprietorship and firm formation rate data are used to measure entrepreneurial activity. The results show start-up businesses contribute significantly to determining population growth. Employment growth is positively affected by self-employment rates as well as by firm formation rates. In terms of policy implications, the paper recommends the creation of an environment to encourage entrepreneurial activity as a strategy to battle unemployment. It concludes that regional policy makers need to renew their efforts to support the growth of self-employment and sustain the existing firms.

Women-owned businesses are increasingly important to the U.S. economy in terms of numbers of firms owned, revenues and employment. Despite the growing role of female-owned business, the ownership, growth and size of female-owned firms is lower than that of male-owned firms. Differences in access to capital have been one reason attributed as an obstacle to women launching and growing small firms. This paper presents the results of an empirical study that examines differences of the use of bootstrap financing between female- and male-owned small firms. Research on the use of bootstrap financing among small firms is limited. The findings show that bootstrap finance methods were similar among female- and male-owned small firms; however, differences were found relative to age, education, sales and overdraft privileges. The results have implications for female entrepreneurs, support persons or agencies and government agencies providing assistance. Female owners should become more informed about financing options available beyond the traditional sources of capital. During periods of declining sales, especially during recessionary periods, female owners may rely on bootstrap sources to supplement capital needs, as well as proactively developing contingency plans for accessing bootstrap capital. These policies could be incorporated into training programs for female business owners. Educators and consultants could help female owners better understand financing alternatives and the importance if developing contingency plans. Government policy may be able to alleviate capital shortages through programs that better inform female entrepreneurs about the capital acquisition process.

The microfinance industry seeks to alleviate poverty by providing business loans and related financial services to clients who are too small to be served profitably through the formal financial sector. Microbusiness lending is considered to be among the most powerful tools available for promoting entrepreneurial activity and economic development. However, a significant number of current and potential entrepreneurs remain untouched by microfinance. They live in regions considered to have cultures of non-repayment, which render them "unbankable." By better understanding non-repayment cultures and developing management strategies attuned to the unique attributes of these regions, the microfinance industry can effectively and profitably support these underserved entrepreneurs.

Business start-ups by indigenous people in wildlife conservation areas are prone to failure. Funding issues have been identified as a contributing cause of the disappointing results. A great deal has been written about capital structure both in the start-up literature and the corporate literature, but the applicability of this research to small, indigenous start-ups in and around conservation areas is lacking. Although current practice dictates a reliance on equity, we apply the relevant corporate and start-up research to the conservation area context in an attempt to better understand the capital funding question. The results argue that equity funding is appropriate in the early stages for control and liquidity reasons. However, it also shows that greater attention could be paid to some degree of early debt financing to create debt discipline and later debt funding for motivational and financial discipline purposes.

This review maps research on entrepreneurship in transitional economies since the start of institutional reforms. Data came from 129 academic journal articles published between 1990 and 2009. 62 articles reported research on macro (country) level, discussing the nature and speed of reform, credit constraints, assistance programs and the role of small business for economic development. 67 articles studied micro (firm) level factors, but only 14 of them employed data analytical methods to study what explains entrepreneurial success, suggesting a role for networking, industry experience and entrepreneurial orientation. We suggest more research on understanding the context of entrepreneurship, with a special focus on the informal institutional environment and industry structure. Also, future research can explore topics such as strategic agendas, opportunity identification and entrepreneurial cognition, which have been rare to date. We particularly emphasize the need for rigorous and replicable large-scale empirical studies.

This paper examines the impact of personal factors in the decision of small, locally-owned firms from an emerging economy to enter into exporting. It drew on the logistic regression model to analyze the probability of a firm entering into exporting given its founder/owner possesses certain personal attributes. The results reveal personal attributes such as international job experience and foreign travel experience are the most critical in determining whether or not the firm exports. These results demonstrate demographic factors such as age and education level of the owner are less important and behavioral factors are more significant. Public policymakers interested in getting more firms to export can use these results as a guide to develop training centers that will encourage specific entrepreneurial behaviors germane to export initiation in small firms.