The Moderating Effect of Countries’ Development on the Characterization of the Social Entrepreneur: An Empirical Analysis with GEM Data

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to analyze the moderating effect that the level of development of countries exerts on the factors that define the behavior of social entrepreneurs, distinguishing the effect produced in innovation-driven economies from that in factor/efficiency-driven economies. Our study contributes to the advancement of one of the most relevant problems detected in social entrepreneurship research: the lack of empirical quantitative studies, mainly due to the lack of harmonized and comparable international data. We perform an empirical multivariable analysis using 2015 Global Entrepreneurship Monitor data related to social entrepreneurship. The results show that both the variables that measure the values and skills to start a business and those related to the environment differentiate social from commercial entrepreneurs. In addition, our findings show how the development of the country plays a decisive moderating role, modifying the effect of the values and skills to be a social entrepreneur, the influence of gender, and even the relevance of entrepreneurs' perception of their environment.

The Influence of the Ecosystem on the Motivation of Social Entrepreneurs

“…The results show the importance of the ecosystem in the analysis of the motivation of social entrepreneurs, which is a fundamental aspect when establishing and evaluating support policies and promotion of this type of activities. In addition, the level of development of countries as it was evidenced by [56] is also essential when analyzing the relevance of the entrepreneurial ecosystem. This result is especially relevant when evaluating the effectiveness of support policies for social entrepreneurial activity, since its influence is strongly determined by the type of country in which they are applied.…”

“…The internal factors include values, attitudes, and entrepreneurial skills [48][49][50] and the entrepreneur's personal characteristics [28,30,51,52]. The external factors include the entrepreneurial environment [32,[53][54][55] and the financial and institutional environment [21,27,38,40,56].…”

Emprendimiento social en jóvenes: análisis de su relación con otras formas de participación social

“…A pesar de ello, Gupta et al (2020) identifican que en los últimos años se ha incrementado sustancialmente el interés por el estudio del impacto social del emprendimiento social, la innovación, las estrategias y modelos de negocio, y la creación y difusión de valor. Respecto a las metodologías utilizadas en la investigación, la aproximación cualitativa, especialmente los estudios de casos, es la que parece dominar, lo que demuestra la necesidad de estudios cuantitativos complementarios (Fernández, López y San Martín, 2020;Gupta et al, 2020;Hota et al, 2020). Sumado a ello, Kraus et al (2014) describen que la mayoría de los artículos publicados antes de 2014 eran fundamentalmente conceptuales, y que los estudios empíricos eran escasos.…”

The emergence and contested growth of social enterprise in Thailand

“…To date, social enterprise research has focused on understanding how tensions resulting from the dual mission are resolved (Battilana & Lee, 2014;Doherty et al, 2014;Smith & Tracey, 2016;Wry & Zhao, 2018). There has been an increasing interest in looking at how SE has emerged in different contexts (Defourny & Nyssens, 2017;Kerlin, 2010Kerlin, , 2017Fernández-Laviada et al, 2020). Few studies have looked at its emergence and sector creation in newly industrialized contexts such as Thailand (Chandra & Wong, 2016;Jeong, 2017).…”