Entrepreneurship in Transition Economies: The Role of Institutions and Generational Change

By Saul Estrin, Tomasz Mickiewicz. Social Science Research Network, 2010

185 citations recorded by the source corpus.

The transition economies have lower rates of entrepreneurship than are observed in most developed and developing market economies. The difference is even more marked in the countries of the former Soviet Union than those of Central and Eastern Europe. We link these differences partly with the legacy of communist planning, which needs to be replaced with formal market-supporting institutions. But many of these developments have now taken place, yet entrepreneurial activity still remains low in many places. To analyse this longer term issue, we highlight the necessarily slow pace of development of new informal institutions and the corresponding social attitudes, notably rebuilding the generalised trust. We argue that changes are even slower in the former Soviet Union than Central and Eastern Europe because communist rule was much longer, leading to a lack of institutional memory. We posit that changes in informal institutions may be therefore delayed until after full generational change.

Subfields: Management of Technology and Innovation, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Political Science and International Relations

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b98fb12b86453628bb0e5ebe4ca6e69566eba706

Citations in the corpus

• Institutional asymmetry: How formal and informal institutions affect entrepreneurship in Bulgaria (2015, unknown): “One increasingly important policy domain for promoting the congruence of formal and informal institutions is through education, by shaping the culture, norms and values of the population, although Estrin and Mickiewicz (2011) contend this may occur only after a full generational change.”