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The purpose of this paper is to analyse the drinking behaviour of alcohol dependents in the small island economy Mauritius, which is characterised by different cultures and ethnic groups. The drinking culture of Mauritius as a nation has dramatically changed over recent decades.

The analysis is based on a survey carried out on 300 alcohol dependents in different regions across the island in 2012. Information on alcohol consumption is derived from data obtained on the different types of drink consumed, their drinking preferences and habits, combined with information from the respondents on their alcohol intake. Alcohol-dependent individuals in this study are defined as those people who drink every day, drink in the morning before work and also drink during their working hours. Furthermore, they may also drink to get drunk and may encounter alcohol-related health problems.

The results first reveal that there is a gender gap in alcohol consumption with men being more dependent on alcoholic beverages on a daily basis, in the morning and at work. Second, the paper innovates by focussing on the most vulnerable segment of the population, that is those working in the informal sector. There is evidence that operating in the informal sector or being self-employed enhances the probability of the individual to become alcohol dependent through daily intake and consumption at the workplace. Informality is characterised by low wages, poor working conditions and high vulnerability which makes alcohol an escape avenue from financial difficulties. Consumption of other substances is also entwined with alcohol intake.

The authors focus on the characteristics and behaviour of alcohol-dependent individuals in a small pluriethnic changing society.

The purpose of this paper is to test the female entrepreneurship underperformance hypothesis using a sample of small firms. The paper also attempts to explain why gender matters in entrepreneurship. The paper specifically investigates the differences in turnover of female and male entrepreneurs and also examines the reasons behind this differential performance by accounting for the gender factor.

This study uses survey data on 256 male and female entrepreneurs from the Island of Mauritius. The survey allows for the examination of the performance differential across male- and female-owned small businesses. The paper uses ordinary least squares and logistic estimation techniques to investigate the underperformance of female entrepreneurs. Sensitivity analyses are also undertaken to ensure robustness of the results.

The study finds evidence that gender matters when comparing the performance of male- and female-owned businesses. The results reveal that access to finance is an important hindrance to the performance of these small firms. Furthermore, the study also reveals that ethnicity plays a major role in influencing firm performance.

This paper is among the few studies, which investigates the female entrepreneurship underperformance hypothesis in a small developing state context and also attempts to explain the reasons why gender matters. The paper is an important empirical contribution to the literature in an African context.

The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the socio-economic characteristics of workers engaged in vulnerable jobs in Mauritius. The study has a particular focus on the gender and youth dimensions of vulnerable employment. The study also provides a pre-crisis and post-crisis analysis of vulnerable employment.

The paper uses several waves of the continuous multi-purpose household survey, which is a high-quality individual-level data set, to study vulnerable employment. Several definitions of vulnerable employment are used to identify the workers employed in vulnerable jobs. These include “own-account” workers and “contributing family workers”.

The results obtained suggest that women and young workers have a lower probability of being in vulnerable employment. Marital status, age and education are also important variables influencing the probability of being in vulnerable employment.

The paper has important policy implications regarding welfare and education policies. Appropriate mechanisms need to be put in place for the social protection and training of workers so that they do not end up in vulnerable jobs.

This paper studies Mauritius as it is a small island economy vulnerable to external shocks. Vulnerable unemployment has often been understudied as the focus of many studies has been solely on employment, and the quality of employment has often not been considered.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the characteristics of the ex-garment workers that have turned to self-employment either in the formal or informal sector in the wake of the termination of the multi-fibre arrangement, which led to job losses. This move has given rise to a new community of entrepreneurs in the Mauritian landscape. Hence, this paper tells a story of women empowerment to disempowerment and finally the struggle for them to get re-empowered. This study also shows that there has been a limit to which self-employment led to empowerment for these women as their incomes are low, and they remain in vulnerable positions.

The study analyses the transformation of a sample of ex-garment workers into new entrepreneurs. The analysis in this paper rests on survey data collected from 92 ex-garment female workers, who are presently self-employed in either the formal or informal sectors, in different parts of Mauritius.

The findings reveal that the self-employed women in the sample, who are also ex-garment female workers, are essentially necessity-driven entrepreneurs. Most of them have only basic primary education and seem to have no other choice than to engage either formally or informally in similar activities, given their prior knowledge and experience in the textile and clothing industries. The authors also find evidence of statistically significant differences across age, marital status and household size between those women in the informal sector compared to those engaged in the formal sector.

Resource constraints aside, this study could benefit from a larger sample cutting across many other sub-sectors. So far, the results of this study are only applicable to the specific sample studied. In terms of implications, the study finds that the relevant authorities should come up with targeted policies to help these women and address and alleviate the barriers that they face.

This study provides an insight to help explain why a large group of women have gone into self-employment in Mauritius in the past 10 years. The authors find that self-employment has provided an empowerment outlet for these women so that they can financially contribute to their household income. From the policy-making perspective, this implies that it is important for the government to support the activities of these self-employed women with conducive policies.

The study helps to advance knowledge on self-employed women in a small vulnerable island economy context. Given that the transition from being employed to unemployed and then the move to self-employment happened in a rather short span of time for these women, the contribution of this study is also to put at the forefront the industrial changes and the individual coping strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse the characteristics of women entrepreneurs operating in the informal sector in Mauritius and to investigate the impact of women entrepreneurship on their own livelihoods and that of their families.

Using survey data on 158 women entrepreneurs operating in the informal sector, the authors analyse whether there has been an improvement in the standard of living of women entrepreneurs as a result of their informal entrepreneurial activities.

Findings reveal that the informal sector has provided a self-employment outlet for unemployed and retrenched women in Mauritius. Even if for a majority, their earnings remain low, their informal activity has indeed helped to contribute to their livelihood and household earnings.

Research on informal sector businesses is fraught with limitations, given that these firms operate on the fringes of legality and data are thus a major issue. Hence interviewing owners of informal sector businesses to get relevant data is quite challenging.

The results indicate that informal entrepreneurial activities contribute positively to women's livelihoods, hence policy should be aimed at encouraging women agency even if it is in the informal sector.

The study helps to shed light as to whether entrepreneurship even if it exists in the informal sector helps to improve the living of these women and their families.

This study is innovative as it investigates the livelihood of a vulnerable section of the population, in this case, women entrepreneurs operating in the informal sector. The authors find that the informal sector provides women with higher income when they are married and are more formally educated.

Without an understanding of the factors that influence the expenditure of alcohol-dependent individuals on alcohol, it is unclear whether policies to control excessive consumption of alcohol can be effective. The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the factors that affect the expenditure of alcohol-dependent individuals on alcohol.

The main contribution of this paper is that it relies on a survey consisting exclusively of 300 alcohol-dependent individuals to capture the variables influencing their expenditure on alcohol. The survey was carried out by fieldworkers in the year 2012. The respondents come from varied socio-economic backgrounds and consist of both male and female alcohol-dependent individuals living in various geographical parts of the island of Mauritius.

The results obtained indicate that expenditure on alcohol by alcohol-dependent individuals increases as income increases. Given that the coefficient on the income variable is positive but less than one, this indicates that alcohol is viewed as a necessity. Apart from income, the age when the person first started drinking and the family size are important variables influencing the expenditure of alcohol-dependent individuals on alcohol.

The findings indicate that alcohol-dependent individuals should be sensitized so that they are not tempted to increase expenditure on alcohol as their income increases. Sensitization should be aimed at making them understand that the increase in income allocated toward alcohol expenditure could be better spent. Awareness programs could also help to address the issue of over-consumption of alcohol among the youth.

As far as the authors know, there has not been any empirical studies conducted in Mauritius on the expenditure on alcohol by alcohol-dependent individuals.

This paper uses data on 125 countries to study whether entrepreneurship affects the level of economic development by taking a regional perspective. Specifically, the purpose of this paper is to investigate whether entrepreneurship leads to economic development by accounting for several other factors including the level of financial development, the business environment and governance and the quality of institutions.

To investigate the impact of entrepreneurship on economic development, the paper uses data available from the World Bank Group Entrepreneurship Survey database. The data are augmented with variables from the World Development Indicators and various Doing Business Reports. These variables are used to capture for other factors that affect the level of economic development.

The results indicate that economic development of the countries in the sample is affected by entrepreneurship even after controlling for regional variation. These results indicate that policy makers around the world need to put in place specific policies to promote the entrepreneurship culture among their population.

This paper uses a purely cross-sectional dimension to investigate the factors that impact on economic development with particular focus on entrepreneurship. This study uses cross-section data on various countries from different regions. However, panel data would allow the examination of causality issues and this could be a potential area of further research.

Entrepreneurship is increasingly seen as a development-promoting tool and it is recognized that countries, which facilitate entrepreneurship, tend to have higher economic development. The main finding of this paper is that irrespective of the level of development of any country or the region that it is located in, countries would gain from encouraging entrepreneurship.

The paper uses two broad proxies for entrepreneurship captured by the business density in each country and the number of newly formed limited firms. Interestingly, the paper also captures for regional variation to investigate if the relationship between economic development and entrepreneurship changes when different regions are being considered. The use of a merged data set is therefore a main contribution of this paper to the literature.

This paper introduces the special issue’s six articles with different approaches to investigating gender perspectives on enterprising communities. The papers’ approaches are presented and discussed, and the purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how they relate to the two main concepts of gender and enterprising communities.

This paper is conceptual.

Through the discussion of the articles, the concept of enterprising communities is found to be fuzzy and to contain a multitude of meanings. This paper elaborates on the community concept and its spatial and “of practice” dimensions.

First, the paper contributes by suggesting how the enterprising community concept could be delimited. Second, the research article contributes to gender perspectives on enterprising communities. It elaborates on what gendered enterprising communities are and how gender might influence enterprising communities.

In recent years, the topic of women's entrepreneurship has gained increasing attention from researchers and policymakers. Its role in economic growth and development has been widely recognized in several studies. However, the relationship between gender in entrepreneurship and innovation is an underexplored aspect in particular at a country-level perspective. This paper aims to answer the following question: Does female entrepreneurship impact innovation at a national level?

Using a panel dataset of 35 Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) member countries over the period 2002–2019, the authors carried out a comprehensive econometric analysis, based on the fixed-effect model, the random-effect model and the feasible generalized least squares estimator, as well as a battery of tests to prevent problems of multicollinearity, heteroscedasticity and autocorrelation of the error terms. In doing so, the authors found consistent and robust results on the linear and nonlinear relationship between women's entrepreneurship and innovation, using selected country indicators from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) consortium, the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) and the World Development Indicators (WDI), including female self-employment, female nascent entrepreneurship and R&D investment and controlling for the same relationships in the case of men's entrepreneurship.

This study shows that the level of R&D investment, which according to the literature can be considered as a proxy of innovation, is higher when the level of women's entrepreneurship is low. However, exploring more in depth this relationship and the relationship between male entrepreneurship and innovation, the authors found two important and new results. The first one involves the different impact on R&D investment of female self-employment and female nascent entrepreneurship. In particular, female self-employment appears to have a linear negative impact on the R&D, while the impact of female nascent entrepreneurship is statistically nonsignificant. The second one affects the nonlinearity of the negative effect, suggesting that very different challenges are possible at different levels of women's entrepreneurship. In addition, analyzing the role of human capital in the relationship between R&D investment and women entrepreneurship, it emerges that higher education (as the main component of human capital) makes early-stage women's entrepreneurship more technologically consuming, which promotes R&D investment. A higher level of education lessens the significance of the negative relationship between the simplest type of women entrepreneurship (female self-employment) and R&D investment.

The originality of the study is that it provides new evidence regarding the link between women's entrepreneurship and innovation at the macro level, with a specific focus on self-employed women entrepreneurs and early-stage women entrepreneurship. In this sense, to the best of the authors' knowledge, this study is among the few showing a nonlinear relationship between women's entrepreneurship and country-level innovation and a negative impact only in the case of female self-employment. Moreover, this study has relevant implications from a policymaking perspective, in terms of promoting more productive women's entrepreneurship.