IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/oec/ecoaaa/1449-en.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Lowering barriers to entrepreneurship and promoting small business growth in South Africa

Author

Listed:
  • Christine Lewis
  • Boingotlo Gasealahwe

Abstract

Lowering high levels of unemployment and inequality are amongst the largest challenges facing South Africa. More entrepreneurs and thriving small businesses would contribute to inclusive growth. Measures of entrepreneurial activity are lower in South Africa than in other emerging economies. Barriers to entrepreneurship include bureaucratic procedures and licensing, which are also an ongoing burden on small firms. Public procurement is being used to overcome the dominance of large incumbents, but so far its net effect on small firms is not clear. An education system that better equipped students with basic skills as well as entrepreneurial skills would grow the pipeline of entrepreneurs. New forms of financing are slowly emerging in a system that is dominated by banks. A better evidence base is crucial for more effective financial and non-financial support programmes to boost start-up rates and small firms’ growth.

Suggested Citation

  • Christine Lewis & Boingotlo Gasealahwe, 2017. "Lowering barriers to entrepreneurship and promoting small business growth in South Africa," OECD Economics Department Working Papers 1449, OECD Publishing.
  • Handle: RePEc:oec:ecoaaa:1449-en
    DOI: 10.1787/d60e254f-en
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://doi.org/10.1787/d60e254f-en
    Download Restriction: no

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1787/d60e254f-en?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Fang, Jianchun & Gozgor, Giray & Lau, Chi-Keung Marco & Wu, Wanshan & Yan, Cheng, 2020. "Listed zombie firms and top executive gender: Evidence from an emerging market," Pacific-Basin Finance Journal, Elsevier, vol. 62(C).
    2. Michael Adelowotan, 2021. "Towards Ensuring the Sustainability of South African Small and Medium Enterprises in the Fourth Industrial Revolution Era," Eurasian Journal of Business and Management, Eurasian Publications, vol. 9(1), pages 38-46.

    More about this item

    Keywords

    business regulation; entrepreneurial skills; entrepreneurship; micro and small business; small business taxation; South Africa;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • H25 - Public Economics - - Taxation, Subsidies, and Revenue - - - Business Taxes and Subsidies
    • I25 - Health, Education, and Welfare - - Education - - - Education and Economic Development
    • K2 - Law and Economics - - Regulation and Business Law
    • L26 - Industrial Organization - - Firm Objectives, Organization, and Behavior - - - Entrepreneurship
    • O55 - Economic Development, Innovation, Technological Change, and Growth - - Economywide Country Studies - - - Africa

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:oec:ecoaaa:1449-en. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: the person in charge (email available below). General contact details of provider: https://edirc.repec.org/data/edoecfr.html .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.