The Role of Collectivism and Gender Equality in Informal Entrepreneurship

Informal entrepreneurship (IE) refers to the global portion of entrepreneurial activities, which are not registered with the government and yet operate within socially accepted values and practices. IE has attracted increasing attention from scholars and policy makers over the years because it produces negative externalities. To tackle IE effectively, it is important to understand its origins, which are rooted into collectivistic cultural practices. Drawing on new institutional economics, we hypothesize that in-group and institutional collectivism present curvilinear relationships with the prevalence of IE across countries, and that gender equality influences these relationships. We ran GEE panel regressions employing a dataset including 35 countries over 12 years (2006-2017). Our results support our hypotheses substantially and entail theoretical implications at the intersection of informal entrepreneurship, culture and gender equality, as well as relevant practical implications.     «

Informal entrepreneurship (IE) refers to the global portion of entrepreneurial activities, which are not registered with the government and yet operate within socially accepted values and practices. IE has attracted increasing attention from scholars and policy makers over the years because it produces negative externalities. To tackle IE effectively, it is important to understand its origins, which are rooted into collectivistic cultural practices. Drawing on new institutional economics, we hyp...     »