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There is a consensus in the literature on entrepreneurship on the crucial role of environmental conditions in the identification, development, and quality of entrepreneurial initiatives. Given the relevance of entrepreneurship and the lack of evidence, academic debates request more evidence regarding the main determinants of entrepreneurial activities in emerging economies. Inspired by these academic debates, the objective of this chapter is to provide a better understanding of the role of entrepreneurship in Mexico. Our preliminary results allow us to identify applied research trends to study the entrepreneurial spirit in Mexico, as well as elements to discuss the myths, realities, and challenges faced by Mexican entrepreneurs during the last government administration. Our chapter contributes with implications for entrepreneurs, researchers, and decision-makers.

The entrepreneurial education has obtained special attention by researchers hoping to develop better entrepreneurship programmes that may result in higher entrepreneurial activity outputs of students. The culture on its own is one of the main determinants, among others, of the entrepreneurial activities undertaken in different countries. In that sense, this research contributes to a greater understanding of the relationship between culture and entrepreneurial education. Using one of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s surveys, the National Experts’ Survey, the authors used Structural Equation Models to analyse the sample of N =  445 experts in Mexico as an effort to achieve a consensus about which of these two constructs is dependent on the other, ‘entrepreneurial education’ or ‘cultural and social norms’. The results of this chapter show that in Mexico there is an influence of the cultural and social norms on entrepreneurial education at all levels, primary, secondary, and superior. Nevertheless, an important limitation of the study was that it does not differentiate between private and public education, but yet it contributes to the understanding of the less visible entrepreneurial educational levels in the literature. This chapter aims with the phenomena of how teaching entrepreneurship works by analysing the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s social environment variable effect on entrepreneurial education. This research contributes to the evidence that the teaching practice under the socio-cultural dimension enables to detect the continuity factors to make an educational transformation.

The entrepreneurial ecosystem approach tries to understand the mechanisms underlying new business creation and helps develop tools, governmental policies and support systems that enhance the outcomes of entrepreneurship activities. To ensure a better understanding of those mechanisms, this study aims to contrast regional policies in emerging economies that are designed to foster local new business creation and development.

One of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s surveys, the National Experts’ Survey, was applied to a sample of N = 675 key informants in Mexico at ten entities, seven of whom were categorized as non-centrally located. The authors used non-parametric statistics to compare the differences between centrally and non-centrally located experts.

The main results indicate that non-centrally located experts perceive their regions to be in a worse position than centrally located experts in terms of government policies regulation, post-school education and commercial and physical infrastructure, but surprisingly in a better position regarding financial access, general government policy, government programs, primary and secondary education, R&D transfer, market dynamism and openness and cultural and social norms.

These findings have policy implications for all levels of government in Mexico, which must prioritize the homologation of opportunities for people in both large and small cities.

The replication of a Chilean study contributes to the empirical literature of regional entrepreneurial ecosystems in emerging economies.

Focusing on the family as the central unit of analysis, the purpose of this paper is to examine how entrepreneurial families, with more than one owner/entrepreneur, utilise social capital in a challenging institutional environment.

The empirical focus of this paper is the institutional context of Mexico and how it impacts on entrepreneurial families and their access to social capital. The authors employ an in-depth qualitative approach to understand entrepreneurs’ perspective as being part of an entrepreneurial family. A total of 36 semi-structured interviews were conducted with multiple respondents of each entrepreneurial family.

This study shows that social capital allows members in the entrepreneurial family to access a wider pool of resources to utilise to benefit their ventures, while also helping them to operate in a challenging institutional environment. It also illustrates how social capital is used to overcome institutional asymmetries.

This paper contributes to research by examining the links between institutions and entrepreneurial families through a focus on social capital. It provides a nuanced understanding of how the entrepreneurial family serves as an intermediary through which social capital gives family members access to resources and capabilities to enable their pursuit of entrepreneurial endeavours and overcome the institutional challenges they face in Mexico.

This chapter provides an introduction to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM), a project under Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) regional approach. As a region, the countries of LAC correspond to the second-highest representation in GEM after Europe. The chapter describes the GEM project, summarizes some key longitudinal indicators for the region, and analyzes the contributions and importance of GEM project for the systematic study of entrepreneurship.

This chapter is focused in a methodological frame to study the practices of entrepreneurial agents and the startups in nontechnological sectors in the middle-income countries. The startup of ideas involves three phases that comprise the first life cycle of a possible company considering too sociocultural aspects as external factors implied in the creation, prototype, and entry to markets. In Latin America, the type of risks experienced by companies in their early stages of life and incubation are not known in a timely manner. The lack of information on entrepreneurship and its agents in countries such as Mexico also inhibits visualization of heterogeneity of contexts to business development, and how some regions are more propensity to boost startups than others, in different sectorial and branches of knowledge. Mexico like rest countries in Latin America has a high percentage of SMEs focused in sectors that are innovative but not are participating in the last technological waves. For this reason, it is necessary to know how these agents prepare, manage, and apply entrepreneurship in accordance with institutional, technological, and sociocultural dispositions to structure their experiences and make more vigorous the territorial entrepreneurial. Small and medium businesses are building new paths taking advantage of territorial and cultural opportunities. Applying the framework proposed in the last part of this chapter is presented a case of study of an entrepreneur oriented to craft brewer production in Tijuana, Mexico.

This chapter examines experts’ perceptions of the conditions of their entrepreneurial ecosystems to analyse women’s disadvantages, identify which conditions can improve in comparison to men in Latin America, and if the level of development of their country affects the support women entrepreneurs have. The study is based on regional data collected in Chile and Mexico with one of the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor surveys between 2015 and 2018. With a total sample of N = 2,230 male and female experts, the author uses principal component analysis and non-parametric statistics to compare means between genders and also women in different countries. First, male and female experts’ perceptions are compared at the macrolevel and then total women as a subsample are compared between the women experts’ perceptions by country at the mesolevel. At the macrolevel, the results show a clear perceived disadvantage for women entrepreneurs in all conditions except internal market dynamics. At the mesolevel, the findings show that support for women entrepreneurs is better in most conditions for Mexico, which is a less developed country, in comparison to Chile for this case. This chapter goes from studying the general to the particular issues causing gender gaps in entrepreneurial ecosystems in developing Latin American countries. The dataset used represents the biggest data-gathering project in the field of entrepreneurship for the region.

The Mexican economy is characterized by an extensive business fabric and entrepreneurial culture, which contributes to economic development, the social economy, and the proliferation of entrepreneurship. The effects are reflected in the quality of life, in the growth of employment, in the knowledge spillovers, and in the socioeconomic factors. This chapter offers a contextual review of enterprise creation in Mexico and its relationship on development and entrepreneurship. Following the Economic Censuses and National Survey on Productivity and Competitiveness of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises (ENAPROCE in Spanish), the profile of entrepreneurs in the period 2009–2014 is analyzed. A conceptual contribution is made from the antecedents of the entrepreneurship to evaluate the success factors and determinants that influence the entrepreneurship in the context of Mexico. Within the findings, regions with entrepreneurial culture are precursors of a competitive process and impulse in employment; at the same time, regions with a low level of GDP per capita and low level of development register high rates of new enterprises, most classified as subsistence enterprises.

This chapter uses discourse analysis to explain why entrepreneurship has become a primary response to Africa’s youth employment challenge. It analyses almost 20 years of academic literature and publications from one of the world’s foremost authorities on entrepreneurship: the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM). The study found that youth were positioned within a discourse of entrepreneurial essentialism; where entrepreneurship was narrativised as the only option for youth employment; and youth were framed as entrepreneurship being the natural solution for them. Youth were concurrently framed within numerous contradictory entrepreneurial discourses which were used to elevate and legitimise entrepreneurship as the key pathway for addressing Africa’s youth employment challenge. An important finding in this study was that the dominant model of entrepreneurship being promoted by GEM to address the challenge is a mainly skills-based pathway to self-employment and low-growth microenterprise development. This is concerning for two reasons: firstly, global evidence does not demonstrate much support for such an approach, and secondly, it undermines other responses to youth unemployment, particularly those which seek to address more structural, demand-side barriers to employment.