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This paper aims to investigate the effect of the flat tax system on self-employment by necessity and by opportunity. Specifically, the paper examines whether individuals decide to switch from wage-employment to self-employment by necessity or by opportunity when government imposes a flat tax system.

To analyze the association of a flat tax system with occupational choice this paper uses both multinomial and ordinary logit models. In the multi-nominal logit model, this study separates dependent variables into three categories: wage employee, self-employed by necessity and self-employed by opportunity. In the second step of analyzes using the ordinary logit model, this paper studies only self-employed individuals by distinguishing them according to their preferences.

The results suggest that, in countries with the imposed flat tax system, the probability of being self-employed by necessity is low, while the probability of being self-employed by opportunity is high. Moreover, better economic growth in the country also elevates the chances of individuals to be self-employed by opportunity.

Out novel contribution is documenting that flat tax system in transition countries increases the number of individuals self-employed by opportunity compared to self-employed by necessity.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate student motivation for undertaking an entrepreneurship education programme and their ultimate employment aspirations through a novel data mining technique. The study considered what relationship certain motivation characteristics have to students’ aspirations, specifically in terms of their intention to be self-employed or employed.

The study examined enrolment data of 720 students on an entrepreneurial education programme, with work statuses of full-time, part-time or unemployed and have known aspirations to either employment or self-employment. The Classification and Ranking Belief Simplex (CaRBS) technique is employed in the classification analyses undertaken, which offers an uncertain reasoning based visual approach to the exposition of findings.

The classification findings demonstrate the level of contribution of the different motivations to the discernment of students with self-employed and employed aspirations. The most contributing aspirations were Start-Up, Interests and Qualifications. For these aspirations, further understanding is provided with respect to gender and student age (in terms of the association with aspirations towards self-employed or employed). For example, with respect to Start-Up, the older the unemployed student, the increasing association with employment rather than self-employment career aspirations.

The study identifies candidate motivation and the demographic profile for student's undertaking an entrepreneurial education programme. Knowing applicant aspirations should inform course design, pedagogy and its inherent flexibility and recognise the specific needs of certain student groups.

The study contributes to the literature examining motivations for undertaking entrepreneurship education and categorising motivating factors. These findings will be of value to both education providers and researchers.

The growing popularity of gig and sharing economy changes not only consumption models but also employment patterns. This study aims to analyze the potential entrepreneurial nature of gig and sharing economy initiatives. As such, the authors compare the entrepreneurial intentions of gig and sharing economy workers to the general population. Further, the authors consider commonalities and differences in terms of the driving forces of both intentions to start-up and participation in gig and sharing economy, treating them as connected phenomena. Finally, the authors look into gig and sharing economy experience as a direct antecedent to entrepreneurial intentions formation.

The empirical settings for this study are derived from the sample of 1,257 individuals who participated in the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Adult Population Survey 2018 in Russia. Methodologically, the authors rely on analysis of variance-test and binary logistic regression analysis to test the study hypotheses.

The results indicate that entrepreneurial intentions of gig and sharing economy workers are significantly higher when compared to the general population. In terms of antecedents to gig and sharing economy participation and startup intentions, similar effects of age, entrepreneurial social capital, prior entrepreneurial exit and intrapreneurial experience were revealed, while perceived self-efficacy was associated only with engagement into digital platforms. Finally, gig and sharing economy experience showed significant and positive effect on entrepreneurial intentions formation.

This study represents a first substantive effort to systematize antecedents to gig and sharing economy participation through an entrepreneurship perspective. Beyond that, this research adds to the contextualization of entrepreneurship literature stream, further defining the mechanism of entrepreneurial intentions formation in empirical settings of an emerging market with a relatively low propensity of population to develop intentions to start-up.

Women’s entrepreneurship has become an essential movement in developing economies and is accepted in all working areas. This study aims to propose the effect of institutional support (IS) and entrepreneurial knowledge (ENK) on women’s entrepreneurial self-efficacy (WESE) and venture performance (VP) in a developing country, namely, Pakistan.

The constructive theoretical framework comprises of an extensive review of current literature. In this study, the researchers used a deductive approach that used cross-sectional data collected through women entrepreneurs completing a questionnaire. Consequently, this study comprised 324 usable samples.

The structural equation model reveals that formal institutional support (FIS), informal institutional support (IFIS) and ENK have a positive and significant effect on WESE that is concerned with the VP. Finally, WESE is a potent construct that mediates the association between FIS, IFIS, ENK and VP.

This study’s findings provide policymakers and government with guidance so that, by providing entrepreneurship and technical courses to develop more entrepreneurial self-efficacy, they focus more on women’s entrepreneurship. Ultimately, this improves VP. Finally, this study’s findings would provide guidelines for allocating financial assistance or funds for women. By using these funds, they can start their businesses to tackle miserable conditions, i.e. poverty and unemployment.

This study’s findings help to support the creation of self-employment opportunities and starting a business to improve well-being and socioeconomic conditions.

This paper aims to provide an in-depth awareness into the research on customised training programme for the indigenous population in India. The central aim is to conduct a systematic review on the available studies to explore its crucial themes interweaving with skill development.

This study uses systematic review method, for which the author uses Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses guidelines, SPIDER tool and Mendeley to identify relevant articles from 2011 to 2022.

Results show that the customised training programme is useful for the first-generation population to upgrade their skills. It aids in improving scalability, supports job creation and facilitates in mitigating low level of training exposure by meeting the local needs. However, poor approachability on customised training, its oversimplification and lack of research dents the critical insights and prospects.

The novelty of this paper lies on retrieving the essential indicators of customised training from previous studies by systematic review tools. It can aid academicians, educators, local administration and policymakers to understand its benefits for indigenous population to fill the policy gaps.

This paper aims to test for spatial convergence in financial inclusion across major Indian states and union territories.

After initially building an Index of Financial Inclusion (IFI) for major Indian states between 2003 and 2016, exploratory spatial data analysis (ESDA) is employed to draw inferences about mean and variance of IFI. The paper then seeks to confirm the ESDA results through spatial panel regression techniques. Finally, spatial results are correlated with results from aspatial convergence measures.

The study finds that there is no evidence of spatial convergence in financial inclusion over the study period, suggesting that those states that were relatively less financially included remained so through the study period. The study also asserts the relevance of certain important determinants, namely, per capita income, infrastructure, industrialization and gender.

This study has two limitations. First, only banking institutions are considered in measuring financial inclusion. Second, due to lack of a consistent indicator of gender participation across states, we had to employ sex ratio as a proxy.

The study suggests that policies to expand financial inclusion in Indian states, especially those with low inclusion levels are likely to benefit neighbouring states also, thereby accelerating the financial inclusion drive across states.

The study is a first in the Indian context to estimate the spatial dependence of financial inclusion and provides relevant implications for policymakers and bankers to target financial inclusion schemes in backward states.

The coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic has had profound economic effects, putting women entrepreneurs at considerable risk of losing income and sales growth as a result. This study aims to examine whether the COVID-19 pandemic is a blessing or a curse for women entrepreneurs in Pakistan’s informal sector. The influence of business type, family support and other socio-economic factors on the sales volume of women’s businesses is examined.

Data were collected from 400 women entrepreneurs using a survey questionnaire. Logistic regression was used to investigate the relationships between perceived sales volume and socio-economic as well as demographic factors of women entrepreneurs.

Findings for RQ1 revealed that the pandemic was a blessing for cloth and cosmetic entrepreneurs, but a curse for those women selling dairy products. Results for RQ2 showed that age, homeownership, household size, family support and type of business were significant predictors of sales. Furthermore, women entrepreneurs were greatly influenced by their family’s desires and decisions, such that women entrepreneurs who received support from families and relatives reported higher sales than those who did not receive such support.

The results may assist policymakers in designing supportive programs to encourage women’s informal entrepreneurial activities. Creating entrepreneurial ecosystems may provide support for women entrepreneurs beyond family support. The findings provide a better understanding of women’s business effectiveness during COVID-19 pandemic. It reveals the resilience of women entrepreneurs in the face of cultural, economic and institutional constraints encountered during the pandemic.

This study is unique because it focuses on the impact of the pandemic at the household level rather than examining broad macroeconomic scenarios. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study is the first attempt to explore the informal, home-based business sector of women entrepreneurs in Pakistan during the pandemic.

The entrepreneurial process is a result of an interaction between an individual entrepreneur and the surrounding entrepreneurial ecosystem. The purpose of this paper is to determine whether US metropolitan areas with disproportionately high shares of entrepreneurs are systematically linked to particular attributes of the entrepreneurial support system?

In this paper, non-farm proprietorship (NFP) employment data from the US Bureau of Economic Analysis is used as a dependent variable proxy for entrepreneurship. NFP data are widely used in the entrepreneurship literature. Data on all independent variables were obtained from the Census Bureau’s American Community Survey and the Bureau of Labor Statistics by metropolitan area and subject to a stepwise linear regression analysis.

The relative share of NFP employment by metropolitan area exhibited a strong positive relationship with percentage of employment in finance, insurance and real estate, median age, percentage of Hispanic population and median home value. It is argued that the combination of significant predictors captures both out-of-necessity self-employment (e.g. low-skilled Hispanic and aging populations) and a self-employment of opportunity (e.g. access to capital).

Public policies focused on nurturing entrepreneurial ecosystems must account for these divergent explanatory frameworks when attempting to encourage NFP employment.

The paper has an explicit spatial context that tends to be overlooked in the traditional entrepreneurship literature. The focus on out-of-necessity versus opportunity-based entrepreneurship, and how it is shaped by some key predictors at the metropolitan scale, is a relatively new angle.

Past research on self-employment and health yielded conflicting findings. Integrating predictions from the Stressor-Strain Outcome model, research on challenge stressors and allostatic load, we predict that physical and mental health are affected by self-employment in distinct ways which play out over different time horizons. We also test whether the health impacts of self-employment are due to enhanced stress (work-related strain) and differ for man and women.

We apply non-parametric propensity score matching in combination with a difference-in-difference approach and longitudinal cohort data to examine self-selection and the causal relationship between self-employment and health. We focus on those that transit into self-employment from paid employment (opportunity self-employment) and analyze strain and health over four years relative to individuals in paid employment.

Those with poorer mental health are more likely to self-select into self-employment. After entering self-employment, individuals experience a short-term uplift in mental health due to lower work-related strain, especially for self-employed men. In the longer-term (four years) the mental health of the self-employed drops back to pre-self-employment levels. We find no effect of self-employment on physical health.

Our research helps to understand the nonpecuniary benefits of self-employment and suggests that we should not advocate self-employment as a “healthy” career.

This article advances research on self-employment and health. Grounded in stress theories it offers new insights relating to self-selection, the temporality of effects, the mediating role of work-related strain, and gender that collectively help to explain why past research yielded conflicting findings.