High-growth entrepreneurial firms in Africa: a quantile regression approach

By Micheline Goedhuys, L. Sleuwaegen. 2010

353 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This article analyses the growth performance of a large set of entrepreneurial firms in ten manufacturing sectors of 11 Sub-Saharan African countries. The focus of the article is on identifying those entrepreneurs’ attributes and firm characteristics that tend to generate a significant number of high-growth firms in these countries. To this end, we use a quantile regression, which provides a more complete estimation of the growth distribution of firms conditional on different attributes. The results indicate that firms that engage in product innovation, have their own transport means and are connected to the internet through their own website are especially characterized by higher growth rates and also display a distribution of growth rates skewed to the right, hosting a higher number of high-growth firms. The effect of the last two variables, which relate to distance-bridging modes of infrastructure, points to the self-reinforcing growth effects they generate in creating wider input and output markets. Education raises growth opportunities by affecting the lower quantiles, but it does not appear to influence the upper quantiles. The estimated conditional growth distributions for the technology-intensive machinery and electronics sectors show more extreme tails and a lower mean in comparison to the traditional industries, indicating the more risky nature of doing business in these industries.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/0e71d1fc1b4e88e5372b4b0b1272bdea0fa9efaa

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Accounting

In Economics and Econometrics

Citations in the corpus

Myth-busting and entrepreneurship policy: the case of high growth firms (2017, background): “2008), subSaharan Africa (Goedhuys and Sleuwaegen, 2010) and New Zealand (Hinton and Hamilton 2013; Satterthwaite and Hamilton, 2016), the current conceptualisation (and”
Firm Innovativeness and Export Performance: Environmental, Networking, and Structural Contingencies (2013, background): “…chain (Wiklund and Shepherd 2011), (2) companies that were owned and controlled by individual (or a team of) entrepreneurs with majority ownership (Goedhuys and Sleuwaegen 2010), (3) firms that employed a minimum of five full-time employees (Goedhuys and Sleuwaegen 2010; Wiklund and Shepherd…”
Entrepreneurship and Sustainability: The Need for Innovative and Institutional Solutions (2017, background): “…diffuse in LDCs (Naudé, 2009), where poverty and lack of formal opportunities often push people into entrepreneurial activities ranging from street vending to traditional and personal services - in most cases within the informal sector (see, e.g., Stam, 2011; Goedhuys and Sleuwaegen, 2010).”
Energy poverty in Ghana: Any progress so far? (2019, background): “At the micro level, several studies have shown that access to electricity enhances firm productivity, creates employment, and improves household income [27,28].”
Comparative International Entrepreneurship (2016, neutral): “…galbraith & Nkwenti-Zamcho (2005) gassmann & Keupp (2007) gebert & Steinkamp (1991) george & Prabhu (2000) george & Zahra (2002) gibb & Haas (1996) goedhuys & Sleuwaegen (2010) grichnik (2008) grilo & Irigoyen (2006) gupta, MacMillan, & Surie (2004) Haahti, Madupu, Yavas, & Babakus (2005)…”
The Form of Relationship between Firm-Level Product Innovativeness and New Product Performance in Developed and Emerging Markets (2015, background): “In addition, unlike developed markets, emerging markets often suffer from greater political instability, corruption, and uncertain macro-economic conditions (Goedhuys and Sleuwaegen, 2010), which may increase risks and uncertainties (Hoskisson et al.”
Innovation and firm growth: Does firm age play a role? (2016, neutral): “…has been frequently applied to analyse issues related to the distribution of returns to innovation (Coad and Rao, 2006; Coad and Rao, 2008; Goedhuys and Sleuwaegen, 2009; Hölzl, 2009; Kaiser, 2009; Love et al., 2009; Ebersberger et al., 2010; Segarra and Teruel, 2011; Falk, 2012; Mata and…”
Strategic entrepreneurship and small firm growth in Ghana (2014, background): “However, employment in small firms is potentially an important route to development for many developing countries, as well as a source of income and supplier of domestic goods and services (Goedhuys and Sleuwaegen, 2010; Mead and Liedholm, 1998).”
Firm Growth: Empirical Analysis (2010, neutral): “Empirical results from quantile regressions has shown that, while innovation has a limited impact on the sales growth rates of average ﬁrms, it is much more important for the fastest-growing ﬁrms (Coad and Rao 2008; H¨olzl 2009; Goedhuys and Sleuwaegen 2009, see also Stam and Wennberg 2009).”
Entrepreneurial orientation, market orientation, network ties, and performance: Study of entrepreneurial firms in a developing economy (2013, background): “…in such economies are experiencing rapid structural changes, including the opening of their economies to foreign direct investments (with associated global competitive pressures), increased environment uncertainty and unbalanced growth (Chironga et al., 2011; Goedhuys and Sleuwaegen, 2010 ).”