Informal Entrepreneurship Education: Overview of the Russian Field

This article analyzes the informal sector of entrepreneurial education — free “open” educational projects at the federal level in the context of broader trends in the development of education and society, including education’s ‘unbundling’. The search for information was carried out using the Internet, as a result 45 initiatives were discovered. The results show that the sector of entrepreneurship education is broad, but there are a large number of areas for improvement, in which universities can play an important role. In particular, this concerns elaborating and implementing a system for evaluating educational results, organizing monitoring of the effectiveness of such initiatives, including the analysis of success stories. In addition, a separate task is to expand the set of targeted programs for specific audiences (for example, unemployed), as well as to improve the content of such initiatives more deeply according to the specifics of the relevant target groups (for example, young mothers or older people).

Informal entrepreneurship and women's empowerment – the case of street vendors in urban Colombia

PurposeInternational development organizations promote access to resources through self-employment as one of the main strategies to achieve women's empowerment. However, many self-employees are more similar to informal workers than to successful entrepreneurs affecting women's control over resources and their empowerment process. This article analyzes the relationship between informal entrepreneurship and female empowerment in the context of an emerging economy.Design/methodology/approachThe authors surveyed a sample of 295 female street vendors in Bogotá – Colombia. Contingency and correlational analysis is performed.FindingsEvidence is found about the expansion of women's capacity to make decisions about resource allocation and time managing because of informal entrepreneurship. Nevertheless, these decisions are not strategic nor given in a context with several options. Several structural constraints to the exercise of agency limit empowerment to an individual process dependent on circumstances instead of a collective process resulting in changes in women's social conditions.Research limitations/implicationsThis research allows for a better understanding of the potentialities and opportunities these entrepreneurships offer to women and what strategies could be implemented to take advantage of them.Practical implicationsDespite their characteristics, informal entrepreneurship has potentialities to improve female empowerment especially when factors beyond economic rationality, such as personal, familial and sociocultural, are considered.Originality/valueThe authors discuss the category of informal entrepreneurship in emerging economies and evaluate the success of this type of entrepreneurship with a gender point of view by incorporating empowerment as measure.

Formal and informal entrepreneurship: a cross-country policy perspective

This paper distinguishes between formal and informal entrepreneurship. It theorises that each are influenced by very different combinations of macro-economic factors and strongly moderated by country income levels. Empirically, we show the ease of starting a business and high-quality governance, exert a powerful influence on formal, but not informal entrepreneurship. The latter is influenced by self-employment rates in low-income countries and by female labour force participation in high-income countries. Policy-makers seeking to improve economic welfare through enhancing entrepreneurship therefore have to choose the ‘type’ of entrepreneurship on which to focus and then select appropriate policies. By providing a novel grouping of these policies, we are able to assist them in making these choices.

Two-sided Institutional Impacts and Informal Entrepreneurship Motivation in Nigeria

Institutions are developed to direct individuals’ behaviours in ways that lead to their fulfilment. However, either by deliberate human design or other factors, institutions can also either impact positively or negatively on individuals with entrepreneurial ambition. This characterisation is typical of Nigeria’s institutions because of their often two-sided impacts on the individual. This article uses interview data from a qualitative study to demonstrate how ambiguity, as reflected in the often conflicting effects of institutional arrangements in Nigeria influence the decision to engage in informal entrepreneurship. In particular, the finding that both the enforcement and the absence of enforcement of formal laws potentially cause informality, presents a challenge that seriously implicate policy formulation and point to the need for more targeted research.

Informality and Entrepreneurship in Developing Economy: Case for Entrepreneurial Financing

Over a decade ago, scholars in different domains of knowledge such as strategic management, economics, accounting, and finance have largely contributed to the theoretical and empirical studies of entrepreneurial financing. However, bridging of the domains or the theories that underly the domains, and expanding the frontier of the phenomenon in the context of informal entrepreneurship, are missing in the literature. This paper attempts to conceptualise and problematise various issues that confront informal sector entrepreneurship in accessing adequate financing for start-up opportunity, innovative products, services and technology in the informal markets, and explore how the ambiguity of the diverse domains of knowledge of entrepreneurial financing could be resolved by unifying and integrating the domains within a unique framework. Equally, this paper also aims to provide theoretical contributions to the extant literature of entrepreneurial financing by suggesting how management accounting research can bridge the gaps of informality problems that confront informal entrepreneurial financing. There is no doubt that informal businesses are saddled with legitimacy concerns such as non-conformity with legality and institutionalised policies. Similarly, the sector is also confronted with the issues of information asymmetry, moral hazard conflict, informal financial and ownership structure. Nonetheless, the informal entrepreneurship sector unarguably has a relevance to the opportunity discovery and innovativeness dimensions of entrepreneurial orientation, with the consequence of positive contributions to the economy in terms of large-scale employment growth. Hence, the scholars in the accounting discipline can leverage on the emerging different financial technology and fund providers to expand the literature on how the untold hardships and complexity that surround the funding of informal entrepreneurial start-ups and innovation can be mitigated. Management accounting discipline, being an applied field of strategic management can play vital roles in mitigating the aforesaid problems of informal entrepreneurship funding, if it could focus on expanding the literature or methodology on goal congruence, information management and controls, financial contracting model, incentive modelling for regulatory policy and search and match model that focuses on informal entrepreneur, investors and financial intermediaries.

Entrepreneurial Income and Wellbeing: Women’s Informal Entrepreneurship in a Developing Context

This study examines the impact of women’s entrepreneurial income on wellbeing. Women entrepreneurs (N = 504) from district Mardan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan participated in the study. ANOVAs and multiple regressions were used to analyze the impact of predictors on the dependent variables (i.e., per capita income, education, health, entertainment, social, household, and other miscellaneous expenditures, investment, savings, and charity). The findings indicated that women’s informal entrepreneurship has a significant role in family, economic, and societal wellbeing. The results contribute to the understanding of women’s entrepreneurial income on individual and family wellbeing. Women’s informal entrepreneurship plays an important role, particularly in the developing world, consistent with the multiplier effect of women entrepreneurs’’ wellbeing. Measures were suggested to empower such women informal, home-based entrepreneurs in view of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals.

The relationship between innovation and informal entrepreneurship: evidence from a developing country

PurposeThis paper aims to evaluate whether entrepreneurs with an innovative product/service are more likely to formally register their businesses. Understanding the decision of business registration as a rational choice of the entrepreneurs, where she weighs the costs versus the benefits of such formalization, the study expands the literature on informal entrepreneurship by looking at the benefit-side rather than the typically evaluated cost-side of an individual cost-benefit evaluation.Design/methodology/approachThe authors relied on the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) adult population survey to evaluate the hypothesis. Specifically, the authors used the GEM data of 2016 for Colombia, covering 2,069 observations (a representative sample at the country level), evaluating the relationship between innovativeness and business registration for the early stage of the entrepreneurial process. Given the nature of our dependent variable, the authors estimated a logistic regression model.FindingsDifferent from what the authors hypothesized, they did not find empirical evidence for a positive correlation between an innovative product or service and business registration. Instead, businesses that compete with many others offering the same product/service have a higher tendency to register at the Chamber of Commerce. Contrarily of what might be suspected, opportunity-based entrepreneurship – as opposed to necessity-based – is not a relevant variable when formalizing a business, providing evidence for our hypothesis that necessity-based entrepreneurship cannot be equalized with informal entrepreneurship. Additionally, the authors show that an entrepreneur with higher socioeconomic status is more likely to register his company.Research limitations/implicationsThe results provide first exploratory evidence that the benefit evaluation may play a role in formalizing a start-up, thus calling for future research that not only tackles the influence of registration costs and administrative burden but rather looks at the outcome of a cost-benefit analysis. The data imply several limitations which future research should address: variables measuring the innovativeness of the product/service are rather coarse measures and need to be expanded and detailed in future research. Additionally, the authors acknowledge that a relatively high number of missing values may generate a selection bias in our population sample. Finally, because of situating the research in a developing country, the research results may lack generalizability. Therefore, researchers are encouraged to test the proposed propositions further.Practical implicationsIn a country like Colombia with very high levels of informality, it is necessary that the government fully understands the role of innovation in the formalization process of start-ups. The results indicate that a differentiation of support mechanisms to increase the formalization of businesses according to the different stages of their development may be necessary and that aside from costs, benefits of formalization play a role. A higher level of formality is not only related to economic growth but also much better protection of workers, therefore going beyond the reduction of registration costs and the implied administrative burden should be an additional public policy target for decreasing informality. Finally, the correlation of socioeconomic stratum with the decision to register hints at a varying evaluation of formalization, a point that merits attention by government and academia.Originality/valueThe study shifts the focus from the evaluation of solely costs for business registering as a barrier to start-up formalization to the cost-benefit analysis. The authors propose – and show – that such an evaluation is not generalizable for all kinds of business. Specifically, the authors show that a start-up is more likely to register when it competes with a large number of competitors than when it competes with a smaller number of others offering the same. At the same time, the authors also show that the stage at which the start-up company is at influences the decision to formalize.