While previous studies highlight the importance of the manufacturing sector in the economy, we argue that rather backbone services play a key role for economic growth. We perform an Input-Output analysis to determine the linkages between backbone services and manufacturing in South Africa. We...

The paper reviews the approaches that have been followed for analyzing the effect of new business formation on regional development. It begins with an outline of how start-ups may affect regional development. In dealing with different ways of empirically assessing these effects, I particularly...

This paper reviews the current state of knowledge about the effect of new business formation on regional development. After a brief sketch of the origins of research on this issue, the main results of different lines of inquiry are discussed. Main issues are the development of start-up cohorts,...

This paper investigates the impact of new firms' quality on the magnitude of their employment effects. Our results clearly show that the quality of start-ups, measured by their affiliation with sectors and innovative industries, strongly influences the direct and the overall employment...

This paper argues that globalization has led to a shift in developed countries from an industrial to an entrepreneurial model of production. Globalization is interpreted as a level shock in the supply of unskilled labor to the world economy, a decrease in the level of political risk associated...

This paper explores the potential of microfinance in post-conflict economies, and speci-fically examines policy considerations for the case of Iraq. It presents important condi-tions of the post-conflict economy, and examines three critical requirements for suc-cessful microfinance operations,...

The issue of poverty traps is assessed using quantile regression. For that an augmentation of the usual convergence regressions by quadratic and cubic terms is used with emphasis on curve fitting rather than parameter estimation. The results show that the generic mechanism leading to poverty...

We investigate regional differences in the contribution of newly founded businesses to regional employment. This is labeled the direct employment effect of new businesses. The analysis is at the spatial level of West German planning regions for the period 1984-2002. We find rather pronounced...

Recent empirical research has found that the effect of new business formation on employment emerges over a period of about ten years and has identified a 'wave' pattern of these effects. In this study, we decompose the overall contribution of new business formation on employment change into...

We investigate the effects that new business formation has on employment in incumbent firms and compare it to the development in the start-ups. The analysis is performed for West German regions over the 1984-2002 period. It shows that the employment effects of new businesses on the incumbents...