This article analyses the growth performance of a large set of entrepreneurial firms in ten manufacturing sectors of 11 Sub-Saharan African countries. The focus of the article is on identifying those entrepreneurs' attributes and firm characteristics that tend to generate a significant number of highgrowth firms in these countries. To this end, we use a quantile regression, which provides a more complete estimation of the growth distribution of firms conditional on different attributes. The results indicate that firms that engage in product innovation, have their own transport means and are connected to the internet through their own website are especially characterized by higher growth rates and also display a distribution of growth rates skewed to the right, hosting a higher number of high-growth firms. The effect of the last two variables, which relate to distance-bridging modes of infrastructure, points to the self-reinforcing growth effects they generate in creating wider input and output markets. Education raises growth opportunities by affecting the lower quantiles, but it does not appear to influence the upper quantiles. The estimated conditional growth distributions for the technology-intensive machinery and electronics sectors show more extreme tails and a lower mean in comparison to the traditional industries, indicating the more risky nature of doing business in these industries.

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This paper makes several contributions to the emerging literature on the post-entry behavior of international new ventures. Based on an extensive longitudinal data set, we investigate the dynamics of commitment, growth and survival of different types of newly internationalizing Belgian firms. Global start-ups have the highest initial and rapidly rising export commitment per market and are also more likely to continue exporting over time than geographically focused start-ups, and traditional staged exporters. However, global start-ups also display the highest failure rate. This high failure rate appears to result primarily from the 'liability of newness' and less from the added complexity associated with rapid and wide scope internationalization.

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