This paper describes the very different role played by female elites in contemporary developing countries, as compared to the ‘early’ industrializing countries of the nineteenth and early twentieth century. It shows that women are far more important in business and politics in today’s...

Rapid economic development in China in the post-1978 era has been considered ‘intriguing’ and ‘puzzling’ since it occurred under the dominance of the Chinese Communist Party – the fusion of politics and economics is supposed to be a powerful impediment to market growth. Scholars have...

Entrepreneurship is generally regarded as a force of change, innovation, and development in modern economies. Entrepreneurs bring new and better products to markets, restore allocative efficiency through arbitrage and reinvest their profits. However,

Over 1.8 billion people, from Central Europe to East Asia, have been involved in the great systemic transformation to market economy, civic society and democracy. The process has brought mixed fruits. The diversification of the current situation is a resu

The global economic crisis, which erupted about one year ago with the US sub-prime mortgage crisis and the collapse of the investment bank Lehman Brothers, painfully reminds us on how vulnerable developing countries can be to external shocks.This short paper provides an overview of recent...

This policy brief provides some fresh perspectives on the relationship between entrepreneurship and development, and considers policy design issues. It reports on the UNU-WIDER two-year research project “Promoting Entrepreneurial Capacity”, which aimed to understand whether and how...

It is often claimed that entrepreneurship is indispensable for economic growth and development. These claims are mostly generated by scholars working in the field of entrepreneurship andmanagement studies. In contrast, development economics scholars seem to be less concerned about...

At the very time that professional skepticism concerning the effectiveness of foreign aid has reached new heights, donors seem to be ready to substantially increase the volume of aid they are willing to make available. This paper attempts to address this paradox by first examining the record of...

There is some scepticism about Korea as role model of development as the Korean model involved a considerable degree of state activism, unacceptable in today.s global environment. This paper propose a .capability-based view. of the country.s catch-up development, arguing that the real lesson...

Improved governance and lower start-up costs may not be sufficient for encouraging the type of entrepreneurship that matters for economic growth. Using panel data on 60 countries spanning the period 2003-07 this paper establishes that (i) opportunity-motivated entrepreneurship (as opposed to...