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The purpose of this paper is to analyze the impact of microcredit on per capita income of farm households in Cameroon. It discusses short- and long-term implications of access to microcredit on income poverty.

The authors interviewed rural households with agriculture being either their first or second income-creating activity. All sampled households are clients of a Cameroonian village bank. The authors used a balanced panel with a treatment and a control group, the latter not having had a village bank microcredit yet. The results were reaffirmed using bootstrapping.

This paper argues that microcredit has had a significant positive impact on per capita income in the short run, but the long-term effect was negative, albeit not significant. In the long run, absolute income poverty had further decreased in the treatment group, however, not as much as in the control group. Because the treatment group had been shifting back to the informal financial sector and had diverted part of the microcredit for consumption, this may have led to lower marginal income effects. Productivity of credit financed inputs by the treatment group remained constant, which also explains why the treatment group fell back over time.

The balanced panel data set was relatively small due to attrition over time. This was accounted for using bootstrapping. Nevertheless, research results must be interpreted with care. Furthermore, the discussion is not exhaustive.

Despite tremendous methodological advancements regarding the impact analysis of microcredit on income poverty, findings remain controversial and inconsistent. Frequently, fungibility is a confounding issue. Microcredit policy ought to consider more long-term effects.

There is much discourse amongst development economists about the impact of microcredit on poverty. Research based on panel data may clarify some of the controversial issues. This research paper uses a rather unique panel data set from Cameroonian farm households that are clients of a private sector village bank. The issue of sample size limitation is dealt with using bootstrapping. The authors base the empirical analysis on a comprehensive and theoretically founded economic farm household model.

This chapter takes a qualitative snapshot of rural entrepreneurs in Bulgaria. The aim is to shed light on the formation of non-farm start-up intentions in rural post-communism communities.

A qualitative ethnographical methodological approach centred on a theoretical framework, based on Ajzen’s (1991) Theory of Planned Behaviour. Primary survey data are drawn from the village of Kostandovo, in the Pazardjik region of Bulgaria.

A holistic perspective reveals entrepreneurship to be just one facet of complex rural livelihood strategies. Distrust in formal institutions by rural entrepreneurs dominates the Bulgarian business climate. A culture of informality in business is accompanied by widely accepted corruption. Crucial factors affecting the start-up decision in post-communist economies are social capital, a lack of experience of the entrepreneurs, and by public administrators.

The presented evidence highlights different dimensions of the theoretical constructs. Future research could focus on the impact of inefficient/corrupt institutions on the decisions of potential rural entrepreneurs.

By coupling universally applicable intention predicting theory with unique ethnographic evidence, the chapter gives a face of the otherwise abstract entrepreneurial agents. The perceptual perspective tackles the most relevant start-up aspects of the post-communist context, providing insights applicable beyond the case country.

The paper is aimed at examining the correspondence between the demand‐side and supply‐side determinants of the existence of non‐profit firms.

The case study approach is used to compare the demand‐side and supply‐side determinants for a single non‐profit organization in rural Cameroon.

It is shown that the supply‐side determinants of the examined non‐profit organization, while interrelated with the demand‐side determinants, are not reducible to these.

This finding implies the need to steer a middle course between those theoretical approaches that assume no integration between the demand‐side and supply‐side determinants, and those that assume complete integration between these.

The current non‐profit economics literature, represented by the above approaches, tends to assume away the complex interaction between the demand‐side and supply‐side rationales of non‐profit organization. The contribution of the present paper is to highlight the limitations of this assumption.

The purpose of this paper is to analyze the effects of network-based individual social capital on the access of rural households to services.

In the context of development economics, an innovative data collection approach is used to determine network-based social capital. The approach originates from the field of sociology and entails a personal network survey. The authors define four social capital variables according to tie strength and social distance between the respondent and his/her network member.

Social network ties are not homogeneous. The econometric results suggest that social capital with weaker ties in combination with socially distant ties can potentially improve households’ access to rural services.

The empirical survey focusses on a single province in Northern Vietnam. Thus, the main limitation of the micro-study is its regional focus. A more representative sample of the whole country would be desirable to backup the policy recommendation.

The results indicate that access to services in rural Vietnam it still too personalized and subjective. Thus, a thorough review of the access procedures and making them more objective would be better choice. This would also root out a potential alley for corruption and nepotism.

The objective of this chapter is to lay the foundation for the edited collection of contemporary research contributions contained in this book. Specifically, the chapter is concerned with defining and conceptualising rural entrepreneurship.

The chapter seeks to explore why and how a rural enterprise can be defined, and determines whether rural entrepreneurship is a distinctive category of entrepreneurship theory and practice. Building on descriptive rural enterprise taxonomies proposed in previous studies, the chapter considers the drivers and barriers impacting on firm start-up, growth and decline in rural environments.

The authors argue that there is little difference between a rural and non-rural enterprise in terms of structure, that is how the business is organised or managed, or how the characteristics of the individual entrepreneur are exhibited. Thus, it would appear that there is no specific category for, nor definition of a rural entrepreneur beyond that of ‘an individual who manages a venture in a rural setting’.

The chapter is based mainly on a review of extant literatures.

The chapter concludes that it is the exogenous factors that differentiate rural from non-rural ventures, and it is these factors that will have a significant impact on start-up, growth and failure rates.