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Explaining micro entrepreneurship in rural Vietnam—a multilevel analysis

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Abstract

In the literature on entrepreneurship, there is an ongoing debate about the impact of regional factors on the entrepreneurial process. To date, most of the empirical work on the influence of regional characteristics on entrepreneurship has focused on developed countries, while empirical work that analyses the regional determinants of micro entrepreneurship in rural areas of emerging markets remains scare. This paper uses three-level binary-logistic random intercept models to analyse the effects of explanatory factors at different levels on micro entrepreneurship in rural Vietnam. Our analyses show that identifying the motivation behind starting a micro enterprise is a good way to split entrepreneurship into two groups: namely opportunity- and necessity-driven entrepreneurship, which are influenced by very different explanatory factors at different levels. We find evidence that in rural areas of emerging markets, the individual level dominates with regard to explaining both opportunity- and necessity-driven entrepreneurship. Nevertheless, the regional level has a significant impact, albeit only on opportunity-driven entrepreneurship.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to acknowledge all participants of the ‘Entrepreneurial Ecosystems Symposium’, which took place at the 14th and 15th of June 2016 in Adelaide, for their constructive and helpful comments on a previous draft of this article. Moreover, we would like to acknowledge the participants of the ‘Essex Summer School in Social Science Data Analysis’, which took place from the 12th of July to the 24th of July 2015 in Colchester, for the extensive discussions about the methods used in the paper. In addition, we thank the anonymous reviewers whose comments helped to improve and clarify this manuscript.

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  1. University of Cologne, Albertus-Magnus-Platz, 50923, Cologne, Germany

    Franziska Sohns & Javier Revilla Diez

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  1. Franziska Sohns
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Correspondence to Franziska Sohns.

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Table 7 Multilevel binary-logistic regression results for starting any micro enterprise
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Sohns, F., Revilla Diez, J. Explaining micro entrepreneurship in rural Vietnam—a multilevel analysis. Small Bus Econ 50, 219–237 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11187-017-9886-2

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