مقاله انگلیسی رایگان در مورد بهره وری کارآفرینی در سطح کشور – الزویر 2020

Developing the concept of institutional incongruence and employing panel data from 60 countries, we outline an alternative view of the informal economy and the effects of regulative institutions on entrepreneurship productivity. We find evidence that the informal economy’s size is, largely, negatively associated with entrepreneurship productivity, and that in the presence of a large informal economy, governmental efforts to improve governance quality can be counterproductive. Our results suggest policy interventions aimed at changing institutions to practice formal entrepreneurship should be implemented cautiously to avoid inducing institutional incongruence.

Executive summary

Although the informal economy constitutes a considerable percentage of business activity around the world, its effects on entrepreneurship have received little research attention (Bruton et al., 2012). As governments in countries with large informal economies attempt to develop their regulative institutions constraining informal business activities, it is important to understand the potential effects on entrepreneurship productivity. Entrepreneurship productivity captures conditions that can lead to entrepreneurship-driven structural transformation and economic growth. Our study provides insights on how the informal economy’s institutional conditions and formal regulation interact to influence entrepreneurship productivity. We focus on the informal economy’s size and extent of regulation, in the form of governance quality. Our cross-country analysis finds the informal economy’s size, reflecting the cognitive and normative institutions of informal business practice, is in most cases negatively associated with entrepreneurship productivity in terms of the ratio of opportunity-to-necessity entrepreneurship. Moreover, we find support for our claim that improving governance quality decreases entrepreneurship productivity when cognitive and normative institutions accept informal business activities. This challenges the literature that argues for developing regulative institutions (e.g., Aparicio et al., 2016). Instead, we find support for an alternative view suggesting the effects of improving regulative institutions on entrepreneurship depend on the state of informal institutions in the country (Kim & Li, 2014a).