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Small Business Economics

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01.11.2011

Institutions and female entrepreneurship

verfasst von: Saul Estrin, Tomasz Mickiewicz

Erschienen in: Small Business Economics | Ausgabe 4/2011

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Abstract

This paper compares the impact of institutions on men and women’s decisions to establish new business start-ups between 2001 and 2006. We use data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor survey (GEM) which cover at least 2,000 individuals per year in each of up to 55 countries and have merged it with country-level data, from the World Bank, Economist Intelligence Unit, Polity IV and the Heritage Foundation. We find that women are less likely to undertake entrepreneurial activity in countries where the state sector is larger, but the rule of law is not generally found to have gender-specific effects. However, more detailed institutional components of discrimination against women, in particular, restrictions on freedom of movement away from home, make it less likely for women to have high entrepreneurial aspirations in terms of employment growth, even if their entry into entrepreneurial activities, including self-employment, is not affected by this.

Vorheriger Artikel Introduction to special issue of Small Business Economics on female entrepreneurship in developed and developing economies

Nächster Artikel How do female entrepreneurs perform? Evidence from three developing regions

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The gender approach we adopt in this paper can be justified on three grounds: equality, merit/efficiency, and need (Jacquette 1990; Razavi 1997). From these perspectives, female entrepreneurship appears to be critical; pointing to the role of women in the creation of new ventures and independent sources of income, ownership and growth, all of which may lead to their empowerment (Fontana and Marcia 2003).

De Soto (2001) argues that the lack of a well-defined and efficient system of registering, protecting and trading property rights may be the key obstacle preventing entrepreneurs from utilising and combining potentially productive assets and turning them into capital.

Childcare is an interesting special case to which we will return later on. On the one hand, given the social context outlined above, a lack of childcare provision could induce women to stay at home. The corresponding short-term effects surfaced in the ex-Soviet bloc in the 1990s. On the other hand, however, the availability of state-sponsored childcare may also affect people’s decisions to have children. In addition, a lack of childcare services may motivate women to start home-based forms of entrepreneurship. Thus, the net effect of accessible childcare services on female entrepreneurial activity rates and on the type of activities undertaken is not obvious a priori.

This discussion concerns the size of the state sector but not government-sponsored legislation that may combat discrimination. The latter is associated with the rule of law, which implies universality and a lack of discrimination, as previously discussed. However, there may be functional complementarity between the two: a larger state sector replaces markets with hierarchies, creating more opportunities for arbitrary actions that make special legislation to combat discrimination more urgent. This prediction can be derived from a transaction cost theory perspective; see Williamson (1985).

Note a large government may also provide more public goods, including education, which may in turn enhance entrepreneurial resources, leading to more entrepreneurship among females.

An alternative strategy would be to instrumentalise the variables using past values, as highlighted in Commander and Svejnar (2011).

The ratio of government expense to GDP is also reported by World Bank’s ‘World Development Indicators’, but Heritage data have the advantage of wider country and time period coverage.

We also estimated two-stage probit–probit selection models, but this is open to criticism on two grounds. First, the separation of the entry decision and growth expectations could be questioned; second, alternative choices of selection variables for the first (entry) equation is also problematic, as already indicated in the previous section. We therefore opt for the more conservative estimation strategy outlined directly above, though the results of the two-stage model were somewhat stronger. We also investigated the possibility of applying multinomial probit, where both high-aspiration entrepreneurship and low-aspiration entrepreneurship are pitched against inactivity (lack of entry). However, the results of Small-Hsiao tests rejected this model, indicating that there is strong interdependence in the three alternatives for our models.

A less sophisticated experiment is to compare ‘in between’ and ‘within’ variation for each indicator. The ordering of results is similar. See also further discussion of time invariance in institutional indicators in Commander and Svejnar (2011).

One may note that the Philippines may be culturally akin to Latin America, where a large proportion of families are maintained by women alone (Braunstein 2000). This is associated with high rates of female entrepreneurship and self-employment. See also Terjesen and Amoros (2010).

In alternative models with standard errors clustered on country-years instead of country-year random effects, the incremental effect of higher education was insignificant. These results are not reported, but are available on request.

This is perhaps a consequence of multicollinearity. Following a suggestion by the referee we also investigated the impact of multicollinearity in more detail by running regressions using the set of independent variables and by taking each of these in turn as dependent. In particular, we found Constraints on Executive and GDP per capita to be collinear, which affects the significance of the former.

Variation in this variable is limited, therefore we should allow for a possibility that it captures some other specific features of countries which are characterised by similar values (see Table 2).

We do not report gender-based interactive terms related to violence against women and to restrictions of women’s movement. Once random effects are included, their effects are neither stable nor robust.

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Titel: Institutions and female entrepreneurship
verfasst von: Saul Estrin
Tomasz Mickiewicz
Publikationsdatum: 01.11.2011
Verlag: Springer US
Erschienen in: Small Business Economics / Ausgabe 4/2011
Print ISSN: 0921-898X
Elektronische ISSN: 1573-0913
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-011-9373-0

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