Search results

The development of family-based microenterprises has attracted the attention of regulators, microfinance institutions and other stakeholders in either developing or least developed countries. In the finance literature, several studies have examined the determinants of the family-based microenterprises development; however, there are several venues that need to be examined. The study aims to explain the economic profit of microenterprises from resource-based theory and human capital perspectives.

Based on critical review and theoretical grounding, this study proposes a conceptual framework, which bridges intangible resources with economic growth of microenterprises.

After reviewing previous studies and based on the underpinning theoretical framework, the study finds that human capital is one of the variables that has received a little attention and yet to be examined as a moderating role. Based on the human capital theorist, individual's competencies help enterprises to perform better in business, as enterprises that possess competencies and capabilities are more likely to have higher levels of growth and profitability.

This finding provides useful implications for the stakeholders and policymakers and contributes in the future literature.

Based on critical review and theoretical grounding, this study proposes a conceptual framework, which bridges intangible resources with economic growth of microenterprises.

The case pertains to entrepreneurship and the struggles of microentrepreneurs in raising adequate funds. It highlights the insufficiencies in implementation of government’s financing schemes for microenterprises. The case also throws light on the difficulties faced by microentrepreneurs in raising capital through banks and more so if the entrepreneur happens to be a woman. This case revolves around a young woman microentrepreneur, from a humble background, who is determined to expand her orthopaedic-support manufacturing unit. It brings out the enormous difficulties faced by her in obtaining an adequate financing through banks despite many laid out government policies to provide relief and stability to microenterprises. The ardent pursuit and the innovatively designed marketing strategy helped the entrepreneur achieve a reasonable success, in spite of the lack of capital. Her revenue for the financial year 2014–2015 rose to Rs. 9 lakhs/per annum. Her projected revenue for 2015–2016 was Rs. 24 lakhs. The ambitious target seemed difficult if additional funds were not forthcoming. With no help from the banks, the entrepreneur was in a dilemma where to raise the funds from. Her long-term plans for growth would be badly affected.

This paper aims to address the following research question: Is loan funding to female entrepreneurs in Egypt, Tunisia and Morocco affected by self-selection from borrowers or/and discrimination from lenders? This paper sheds light on empirical literature review, which displays mixed evidence.

The authors use a pooled sample of 3,896 businesses in Egypt, Morocco and Tunisia drawn from the 2013 World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES). Despite selection biases and overweighing, the sample provides descriptive statistics upon gender ownership and gender management (human capital characteristics and financial data). The authors design two regression logistic models with interaction to investigate loan demand and loan granting with respect to self-selection vs discrimination. Female management is disentangled from female ownership with respect to entrepreneurship.

Neither self-selection nor discrimination affects female owners compared with their male counterparts, whereas female managers do self-select themselves. In as much as the WBES female subsample include several biases, the authors eventually emphasise the importance of the non-surveyed informal sector, which includes most (micro-)businesses, and loan funding provided by the microfinance industry to these female businesses. Microfinance fills the gap for working capital but not for fixed assets. The size of the business is a major factor explaining both self-selection and discrimination.

Findings of this study have important policy implications for closing the gender gap in accessing finance. In addition to supply-side factors, demand-side factors should be addressed. Informality also needs to be addressed, as many micro and small enterprises owned or managed by women are informal entities without registration or/and social protection. One way to increase women's demand for financial services is to introduce financial products to meet their needs (e.g. social protection basic coverage). Governments can help develop these new products by strengthening the microfinance industry with a favourable regulatory and institutional framework. The authors also wonder about the extension of this study. Thus, a new cross-sectional analysis of the most recent surveys in the North African region would allow the authors to enlarge the overall sample and measure the evolution of the gender gap over time.

So far, funding female entrepreneurship remained little investigated in these North African countries. Several sampling biases in the WBES – small businesses underestimation and manufacturing industry overweighting, which have been overlooked so far, explain the absence of self-selection and discrimination. In contrast, size plays an important role. Hence, the focus on microenterprises (the informal sector) and the microfinance industry suggests indeed that female entrepreneurs operating in small businesses have to cope with both self-selection and discrimination.

As families engage in entrepreneurship, particularly in developing economies, women's engagement in such activities is subject to the traditional cultures, norms and values of the communities to which they belong. This paper aims to investigate how the socio-cultural context influences women's entrepreneurship as women engage in “family entrepreneuring”.

The study draws on an inductive qualitative approach to explore how multiple cultural, social and economic contexts encourage women's entrepreneurship and, thus, position them at the centre of family entrepreneuring within this community. Using snowballing techniques, we analyse narratives from 51 women entrepreneurs, generated through semi-structured interviews, to reveal key insights into the practice of family entrepreneuring.

The findings reveal the complex socio-cultural context within the “Adja” community, where polygamy, a traditional and cultural practice, enables the transfer of culturally and socially embedded informal knowledge. The study explains how women's entrepreneuring activities are supported by informal in-family apprenticeships, resulting in family members learning specific skills while also experiencing the feeling of belonging to the family. Showcasing the heterogeneity of contexts, particularly those found in Africa, this study challenges the normative view within the Global North and the dominance of the “heroic male” in entrepreneurship by showcasing how women (especially matriarchs) are significant actors in training other women, co-wives, daughters and relatives in family entrepreneuring.

Thus, this study contributes to the extant literature on family entrepreneuring by revealing an unusual case of women from polygamous families becoming the focal actors in family entrepreneuring activity and challenging the culturally ascribed gender roles to evolve into the breadwinners in their households, as well as focusing on how this process is driven by endogenous knowledge exchange.

The purpose of this paper is to critically evaluate how work and family lives of female entrepreneurs in emerging Sub-Saharan countries including Ghana influence their business performance, with focus on criteria such as income, number of outlets, and number of employees the entrepreneur controls.

A phenomenological qualitative approach to research was adopted for this study to help the researcher gain deeper understanding of experiences of Ghanaian female entrepreneurs with respect to their work and family life and its influence on business performance. With a purposive sampling technique, 25 active women entrepreneurs with family responsibilities were sampled for the study. A multiple case study strategy, in-depth face-to-face interviews, and participant observation were used to solicit responses from participants included in the study.

The study revealed that a majority of female entrepreneurs involved in the study believe that their roles and responsibilities to their families have a negative impact on both the income they generate from their business and their willingness to expand their outlets. However, it has a positive impact on their willingness to employ additional employees in their businesses. As a consequence, this study reveals that quality family life is essential to these female entrepreneurs and they are willing to put the well-being of their families first, even at the expense of their business growth.

The study focused solely on the work and family life of women entrepreneurs and its influence on their business performance in Ghana. However, there exist other critical issues that affect women entrepreneurs in the Sub-Saharan region that can be explored to provide more insight on this subject or in different contexts.

As a first of its kind in the Ghanaian context, little is known in extant literature until now with regard to work and family life of female entrepreneurs and its influence on their business performance. This study therefore seeks to bridge this gap.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the relationship between microfinance participation and entrepreneurial behaviour of Ghanaian families as well as the moderating role of the family head’s gender. It is argued from a resource-based theory perspective that microfinance is a financial resource that removes credit constraints to entrepreneurial behaviour of families. However, gender of the family head creates heterogeneity in this relationship in line with the gender theory.

In order to test these claims, cross-sectional data from 2,727 families on microfinance participation and household characteristics in Ghana are utilised.

The study finds that microfinance participation has a positive and significant relationship with a family’s decision to own an enterprise. Also, the study finds that female-headed families are better utilizers of microfinancial resources for entrepreneurial purposes compared to their male counterparts. This difference is a pure gender effect.

This finding is in contrast to the dominant stream of gender-based entrepreneurship research that suggests that women are subordinate to men and need to be helped to become “honorary men”. From a policy standpoint, solutions aimed at reversing discrimination against women in economic markets must consider women within their own right. The study makes a contribution to the literature by showing empirically the source of heterogeneity in entrepreneurial returns to microfinance participation by families.

The purpose of the research is to identify the major constraints to the growth of micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs) in a less-developed region of an emerging economy and how these constraints are affected by owner/manager's attributes and firm-specific characteristics.

To fulfill the objectives, a structured questionnaire is used to gather data from 200 randomly selected MSMEs located in Cachar district of Assam, India. The study applies factor analysis to categorize various perceived constraints into resolute sets of problem variables or factors. Then, the summated scales are regressed on the predictors related to owner-manager's attributes and firm characteristics to validate the hypotheses.

The results demonstrate that the broad factors constraining the development of MSMEs in Cachar district are as follows: (1) financial issues, (2) infrastructure problems, (3) labor and management issues, (4) market problems and (5) input problems. Furthermore, the findings confirm that firm growth, size, age, sector, location, innovation activity, owner-manager's gender, age and level of education significantly affect the identified constraints.

Although the research is limited to the Cachar district of India, the findings are relevant for other similar districts of India and less-developed regions of emerging economies. However, the study needs to be replicated in other regions of India as well as in other emerging economies for cross-validation and to determine the generalizability of the results.

To the authors' knowledge, no studies linking the constraints faced by MSMEs to owner/manager's attributes and firm-specific characteristics are carried out in the north-eastern region of India. The study also extends the limited researches on the influence of owner-manager's attributes and firm characteristics on the constraints to the growth of MSMEs by incorporating additional predictors.

According to the Government of India’s Ministry of Labour and Employment Report (2015), almost 90% of the Indian workforce can still be categorized as informally employed, generating approximately 50% of the national product. Challenges with data availability have made a rigorous analysis of the informal economy in India often difficult and inadequate for policy formulations. This study aims to fill the gap by providing an empirical analysis of the informal economy in India using micro-data from the World Bank’s Informal Enterprise Surveys.

The authors contribute by empirically testing the association between the adoption of digital technology (payments) and firm performance proxied by firm sales. Matching models are used to mitigate sample selection bias arising out of simultaneous sample selection.

The results suggest that the participation in digital platforms, namely, use of digital payment instruments, is associated with higher sales for firms. The results of this study also show that adoption of digital payments helps in both situations – whether a firm has been using digital technology or has just started using it since the outbreak.

More in-depth data over time, spanning across more cities of India, is needed to conduct a further detailed investigation.

The results should allow policymakers in India to reconsider youth-centric and women-centric business needs, even within the informal sector, which does not often enter the purview of the government but remains responsible for the growth and sustenance of 90% of the country’s workforce. If further research on this issue could engage with the impact of demonetization of currency in 2016 as a lagged shock on sales and reestimate subsequent growth, it would perhaps offer a wider spectrum of how the performance of the informal economy in India affects the entire economy, which has over the last four years and before the onset of Covid reported slower growth.

Productivity is measured in terms of sales of informal firms in India in a regular month or in recent period like last month. Adoption of technology such as making payments using digital platforms can enhance productivity of firms by lowering standard transaction costs and time spent for visiting banks or financial institutions. Albeit not extensively, the literature has investigated digital technology adoption in the context of firms achieving comparative advantage (D’Ippolito et al. 2019; Scuotto et al. 2017), firms generating value creation (Magistretti, Dell’Era and Petruzzelli, 2019), and in helping with strategic initiatives and agility of firms (Ghezzi and Cavallo, 2018; Piccoli and Ives, 2005). Nonetheless, it would incur certain fixed costs, including acquiring skills and awareness, to manage digital platforms. In addition, physical access to instruments such as smartphones or computers and internet connectivity are prerequisites for productivity enhancements. Firms belonging to the informal sector in India generally face these challenges but may also benefit significantly following successful adoption. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first study to conduct a preliminary empirical analysis of the impact of digital technology adoption on the performance of informal sector firms in India.

In this paper, we draw attention to the influence of the institutional logic of family upon a broad range of organizations, and argue that their significance has not been fully realized within the realm of institutional theory and research. Drawing on extant literature, publicly available documents, and interview data, we highlight the prominence of the family logic in the Italian legal sector, where there is a dearth of family firms and the existence of a competing professional logic that interacts with the familial logic. Our research suggests that, even in a setting where logics of capitalism and profession dominate, the organizational form and practices of Italian law firms are significantly influenced by the family logic: firms remain small, resistant to mergers and forms of internationalization, and have successfully resisted the encroachment of invading foreign legal practices. We discuss the significance of the family logic and its manifestations in organizations, and map out future research directions about how multiple logics interact and reinforce each other in national settings.

In this paper, we draw attention to the influence of the institutional logic of family upon a broad range of organizations, and argue that their significance has not been fully realized within the realm of institutional theory and research. Drawing on extant literature, publicly available documents, and interview data, we highlight the prominence of the family logic in the Italian legal sector, where there is a dearth of family firms and the existence of a competing professional logic that interacts with the familial logic. Our research suggests that, even in a setting where logics of capitalism and profession dominate, the organizational form and practices of Italian law firms are significantly influenced by the family logic: firms remain small, resistant to mergers and forms of internationalization, and have successfully resisted the encroachment of invading foreign legal practices. We discuss the significance of the family logic and its manifestations in organizations, and map out future research directions about how multiple logics interact and reinforce each other in national settings.