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In a country that is marred by an excessively high unemployment rate, there is a need for policymakers to prioritise entrepreneurship in South Africa. The study aims to explore the determinants of self-employment among the youth in South Africa and in the process answer the following question: Who are the self-employed youths in South Africa?

Different potential predictors of self-employment empirically used in the literature were used in this study. A probit regression model was used with the binary self-employment variable as the dependent variable and a host of independent variables. A nationally representative survey consisting of youths was used in the analysis.

The findings show that financial literacy increases the odds of being self-employed. Secondly, the odds of being self-employed increase with age as mature people are expected to have gathered enough networks and wisdom over the years. Thirdly, being male decreases the odds of being self-employed. When it comes to education, the only category that statistically increases the odds of being self-employed compared with no schooling is the tertiary level of education. The other educational levels are all statistically insignificant. From a policy perspective, the government should promote self-employment by investing in financial literacy as well as increasing access to tertiary education among disadvantaged groups.

The study is one of the first, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to examine the characteristics of the self-employed using a nationally representative survey in South Africa.

While poverty alleviation is the first core goal of Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), and microfinance institutions (MFIs) are considered important instruments for poverty alleviation in developing countries as they provide credit access to the poor, there is surprisingly little evidence of the drivers of the lending behavior of microfinance institutions. Hence, the purpose of this study is to identify the factors that influence the credit growth of MFIs in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA).

The study relies on unbalanced panel dataset of 130 MFIs operating across 31 countries in SSA during the period 2004–2014 constituting 546 useable observations. The study uses the Arellano-Bover/Blundell-Bond two-step generalized method of moments (GMM) Windmeijer bias-corrected standard errors to estimate the models.

The results confirm that while capitalization, liquidity and size are positively associated with credit growth, profitability negatively impacts credit growth; whereas, other MFI specific factors namely portfolio quality, deposit growth and nondeposit borrowing growth have little direct effects on MFI credit growth. The results also show that MFI credit growth is pro-cyclical but negatively related to GDP per capita consistent with the theory of convergence. On the other hand, inflation and employment are not important covariates in the credit growth of MFIs.

The findings suggest that if MFIs improve their liquidity and size by attracting more deposits and nondeposit borrowings, among others, they can increase credit access to the poor. Moreover, since the lending behavior of MFIs is not resilient to GDP shocks, different measures are needed to increase the financial stability of the microfinance industry. In this respect, since MFI capitalization is positively associated with credit growth and MFI credit growth is pro-cyclical, the findings provide useful insights to central banks/regulatory authorities and the Basel Committee as to the need for a counter-cyclical capital buffer requirement in the microfinance industry.

The study is the first comprehensive study to examine the drivers of MFI lending behavior as an extension to lending behavior models from the banking industry.

The two major entrepreneurial motivations of being “pushed” or “pulled” to start a business have been frequently explored in the entrepreneurship literature. In the global wine industry, thousands of small entrepreneurial wine businesses are flourishing, but few have been started by Black entrepreneurs. What is missing from the research is an exploration of the motivations of these entrepreneurs and what the industry can do to encourage the entrance of more minority entrepreneurs. The purpose of this study is to apply push–pull theory to better understand the motivations and challenges of what prompts Black entrepreneurs to start and succeed in the wine industry.

This exploratory study uses a qualitative methodology of 42 in-depth interviews with US Black winemakers, retailers, and other wine business owners conducted over Zoom. The data were analyzed using Otter software and a thematic coding process for 2,120 pages of rich text.

Findings included 12 motivation themes and 12 challenges for Black wine entrepreneurs, with more emphasis on “push” versus “pull” motivation factors. Many of these entrepreneurs were “pushed” to participate in the industry to create a more inclusive space for Black wine consumers and to create opportunities for other Black professionals and minorities in the industry. Managerial implications include solutions for more inclusive marketing and workplace culture.

This study contributes to push–pull theory by offering a unique perspective on the motivations of Black wine entrepreneurs, as well as being the first study, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, to focus on this issue.

The global recession caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has led to the closure of thousands of village-owned enterprises (VOEs), which are community-managed enterprises that operate in the hostile rural areas in emerging economies. Thus, considering that a Schumpeterian view of economic downturn sees recessions as times where old products/services decline while new products/services emerge, this paper aims to explore the specific innovation-based diversification strategies that matter for the survival of emerging economy VOEs in recession periods to develop new theoretical insights.

The study is based on multiple-case studies of 13 leading VOEs operating in the rural areas of Java Island in Indonesia, an emerging economy. The data was analysed using within-case and cross-case analyses.

Overall, a number of major novel findings have emerged from the analysis, based on which the authors developed several new propositions. First, from the perspectives of both new product and new service diversification, “unrelated diversification” is the primary resilience strategy that seems to be associated with the survival of VOEs in the COVID-19 recession, over and above “related diversification”. Second, from an industrial sector diversification perspective, the most dominant resilient strategy for surviving the recession is “unrelated diversification into tertiary sectors (service sector)”, over and above diversification into the primary sector (agriculture, fisheries and mining) and secondary sector (manufacturing and construction).

The authors contribute to the literature on entrepreneurship in emerging economies by identifying the resilience diversification strategies that matter for the survival of VOEs in recession.

This paper examines the relationship between entrepreneurs' internality of causal attributions and firm growth during an economic crisis. We propose a U-shaped relationship between the two variables, arguing that the highest-growth entrepreneurs are those with either the highest or lowest levels of internal attribution (IA) during such periods.

To test our hypothesis, we analyze a database of 804 interviews with entrepreneurs in Brazil during a period of economic stress. Due to the existence of endogeneity, we estimate a model of simultaneous equations in two stages.

We find evidence of a U-shaped relationship. This means that during economic stress, the fastest-growing entrepreneurs are those who rely more on their own effort (high IA) and those who attribute their success to the economic crisis (low IA).

Tailoring interventions based on attribution patterns and recognizing the U-shaped relationship ensures effective support during economic stress. Entrepreneurial support programs should align with internality levels, emphasizing external awareness or skill development accordingly. Policymakers should take attributions into account when promoting financial resilience. Entrepreneurs would benefit from awareness programs on attributions for reflective decision-making. Ecosystems should foster collaboration by recognizing diverse attributions, enhancing a collective understanding of entrepreneurial responses in crises.

Our results have important implications for understanding the role of entrepreneurs in economic crises. Our results are relevant because they challenge the usual claim that entrepreneurs with high IA are the ones who perform better in situations where external economic conditions are adverse.

This study explores resilience learning from uncertainty, taking a holistic view by considering individual, firm and contextual factors. Resilience development is understood by focusing on how uncertainty is related to entrepreneurs and their environment, suggesting that developing resilience needs to be a continuous learning process.

This qualitative study explores factors related to entrepreneurial uncertainty, resilience and learning. Evidence is drawn from interviews with rural entrepreneurs in two regions of Indonesia, and analyzed using a rigorous approach to generate codes, second-order themes and aggregate dimensions for the theoretical contributions.

Uncertainty readiness, uncertainty response and uncertainty opportunity for resilience emerge as the key learning areas from this study. They are related to resilience on a personal, community and systemic level. The proposed framework relates learning from uncertainty to the process of developing resilience for entrepreneurs and their communities.

This study proposes a framework based on resilience motivation and learning from uncertainty as usual. It explores the relationships between uncertainty readiness, responses and opportunities with personal, relational and systemic resilience factors. This contributes to entrepreneurship behavior research at the intersection of organization studies and management in the socio-economic and often informal context of developing countries.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate if, given personal, supply-related features, and labour demand-related variables, there is a difference in the share of women finding more stable jobs with respect to men, in an eight-year time span.

Fragmentation leads to a lower probability of transitioning into more certain, full-time work positions. The authors analyse a rich cohort of dependent workers in Emilia-Romagna to investigate whether part-time jobs lead to full-time jobs in a “stepping-stone” fashion and whether this happens with the same probability for men and women. The focus is on the cost of part-time jobs rather than the contrast between permanent and temporary jobs, as often observed in the literature. The authors also evaluate the transition between part-time job formulae and open-ended work arrangements to determine whether women's transition to full-fledged, stable work positions is slightly rarer than their male counterparts. Even if the authors allow for the fact that part-time contracts can be a choice and not an obligation, these contracts generate more flexibility in managing the equilibrium between private and work life and create more uncertainty than full-time contracts because of the fragmentation associated with these arrangements.

The authors find that women have a more fragmented working career than men, in that they hold more contracts than men in the same time span; moreover, the authors find that part-time jobs act more as bottlenecks for women than for men.

The authors use a large administrative dataset with over 600,000 workers observed in the 2008–2015 time span, in Emilia Romagna, Italy. The authors can disentangle the number of contracts per worker and observe individual, anonymise personal features, that the authors consider in the authors' propensity score estimate. The authors ran a robustness check of the PSM estimates through coarsened exact matching (CEM).

Women entrepreneurs are often categorized and assessed for various outcomes based on their start-up motivations. It is generally assumed that entrepreneurs with opportunity motivation have better performance when compared to necessity entrepreneurs. This study aims to test these suppositions through the lens of the entrepreneur’s motivation to learn (MTL) and level of female entrepreneurial competencies (FECs), namely, business and management, entrepreneurial, human relations (HR) and personal.

Data collected from 344 respondents through a survey questionnaire was analyzed using the structural equation modelling – partial least squares method using SmartPLS 4.

The findings highlight the need of recognizing the differentials between necessity and opportunity entrepreneurs as they were found to influence performance and learning outcomes. Opportunity entrepreneurship was found to significantly impact both MTL and the FECs. The authors also observed that business and management skills along with HR competencies played a greater role in the firm performance.

The findings demonstrate a case for specialized, tailor-made policy approaches rather than the “one size fits all” approach as evident in many government programs. As necessity entrepreneurs form a vital part of the Indian entrepreneurial ecosystem, apart from mentoring, need-based competency development programs may be looked at. Opportunity entrepreneurs may need support and encouragement through advanced skilling and uncomplicated funding options.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, empirical studies related to women-owned micro, small and medium enterprises in India establishing the relationship between start-up motivation and business performance are scarce. Even in the global context, this is one of the initial studies to examine the relationship through the lens of MTL and competencies.

This research aims to identify the intentions behind becoming an entrepreneur and the perception of entrepreneurial failure among different groups of students. There has been significant research discussing the motivations behind becoming an entrepreneur. However, such a research study is often focused on individuals who are already in the entrepreneurial process. Therefore, this research focuses on the understanding of the entrepreneurial process specified on the intentions of becoming an entrepreneur and the associated risk, in the context of a learning process.

The perspectives of students towards becoming an entrepreneur and their perception of associated risk are identified. A comparative exploratory case study method is used. Three cases developed in the light of empirical evidence consist of Business, Law and Science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) students.

Major results show that the law and STEM students were on the same line in terms of motivational factors, such as being career driven. In contrary, the business students were more driven by personal factors such as leaving something behind and building something meaningful.

Whilst studies have attempted to understand entrepreneurial intentions, little work has considered students and their views on becoming entrepreneurs. Even with studies that looked at this subject matter, the focus was mainly business students. The authors build on previous work and construct the authors' views based on multi-disciplinary student base to know more about their intentions to become an entrepreneur. The science and law students were more influenced by external factors, whereas business students were focused more on their personal goals. Such classification of the diverse intentions based on student discipline opens a new and promising research avenue to better develop entrepreneurial education not only for business students but across all disciplines in higher education.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate the insights of founding entrepreneurs to understand what they consider as motivating factors in their decision to act upon entrepreneurial intentions. Using this information, the entrepreneurial trigger event influence was conceptualized, and a scale developed for use in subsequent testable models.

Qualitative and quantitative techniques were used to construct an instrument that measures the presence and influence of entrepreneurial behavior triggers. The concept of triggering events was explored with 14 founding entrepreneurs. Themes emerged from this enquiry process which informed the development of four primary entrepreneurial triggering events. Over 600 entrepreneurs participated in the study. Exploratory factor analysis was used to identify dimensions of entrepreneurial triggers and was tested using confirmatory factor analysis.

Entrepreneurs perceive that personal fulfillment and job dissatisfaction serve as two significant trigger events which will lead individuals to engage in entrepreneurial behaviors. This research supports theorizing that suggests entrepreneurial trigger events have influence in motivating individuals to act upon entrepreneurial intentions and some trigger events may have more influence toward behavior than others.

This research is subject to multiple limitations. Trigger events were limited to those identified in literature and the interviews. Most entrepreneurs participating in this study were from a limited geographic region. The entrepreneurs in this study reported their triggering event based on their memory which could have been affected by inaccurate recall or memory bias. No attempt has been made to model the comparative effects of the different variables on entrepreneurial outcomes. Finally, the entrepreneurial trigger event instrument did not measure the participant's demographics or psychographics which could have played a role in the influence of reported trigger event.

This study extends previous research that trigger events serve as catalysts for entrepreneurial behavior. Findings support the premise that different types of triggers have different levels of influence as antecedents of entrepreneurial behavior. Specifically, positive, negative, internal and external entrepreneurial triggering events were explicated. The Entrepreneurial Trigger Event Scale created to facilitate this study enables researchers to explore the effects of types and perceived influences of precipitating trigger events on the intentions of the individual that result in entrepreneurial behavior. The optimized instrument further expanded Shapero's (1975) proposed theory of the origins of entrepreneurial behavior.

The development of a scale provides researchers with the opportunity to include the influence of entrepreneurial trigger events, as perceived by entrepreneurs, in future testable models. Entrepreneurial development organizations can use the knowledge to assist in understanding when potential entrepreneurs may act upon entrepreneurial intentions. Information gained can have significant implications for understanding the initiation of entrepreneurial behavior, entity establishment and business growth.

This research responds to a call for investigation into the influence of entrepreneurial trigger events on a person's decision to act upon entrepreneurial intentions. It is an early attempt to conceptualize a relevant construct of entrepreneurial trigger event influence and to develop a scale for use in empirical testing. It is distinguished by using planned behaviors, push and pull, motivation and drive reduction theories. These theories are applied to the perceptions of successful entrepreneurs to develop a construct and validate it.