Fiscalité et dynamique entrepreneuriale en Afrique subsaharienne : les effets asymétriques sur l’entrepreneuriat d’opportunité et de nécessité[Taxation and Entrepreneurial Dynamics in Sub-Saharan Africa: The Asymmetric Effects on Opportunity-Driven and Necessity-Driven Entrepreneurship]

This article aims to demonstrate that taxation, as a modality of formal institutions, exerts asymmetric effects on the development of opportunity and necessity entrepreneurship in sub-Saharan African economies. To this end, it uses an unbalanced panel covering 37 to 44 African economies over the period 2005–2018, based on ILOSTAT–World Bank data, to operationalize the cyclical perspective of Fairlie and Fossen (2018), necessary for constructing two binary indicators of entrepreneurship (OPP and NEC) on African data. A probit model with random effects on binary panel data is then estimated and validated using Wooldridge's (2002) battery of tests. The results, robust to the various tests conducted, show that a one percentage point increase in the total tax burden decreases the probability of opportunity entrepreneurship by 1.2 percentage points (at the 1% significance level) and that of necessity entrepreneurship by 0.8 percentage points (at the 5% significance level). This results in a negative skew of a factor of 1.5 against opportunity entrepreneurship. This magnitude skew, which, to our knowledge, demonstrates the first empirical validation in an African context, shows that the opportunity entrepreneur, directly exposed to the transaction costs of the formal sector, fully bears the impact of the tax burden, while the necessity entrepreneur, partially protected by their informal sector affiliation, experiences only a fraction of it.