On 16 January 2012 MsM ‘s Professor Wim Naudé travelled to Geneva to address the United Nations’ Conference on Trade and Development’s (UNCTAD)
Multi-Year Expert Meeting on Enterprise Development Policies and Capacity-Building in Science, Technology and Innovation.
This meeting followed the launch of UNCTAD’s new
Entrepreneurship Policy Framework. This framework was designed to support policy-makers in developing and emerging countries to promote entrepreneurship.
In his presentation, Professor Naudé talked about the need for entrepreneurship support policies, their potential impacts and success, and the nature of the difficulties that policy makers face in making such programmes work. He pointed out that although such programmes are very popular for many reasons (including for ideological reasons and the fact that most donor governments are cutting down on foreign aid as part of their austerity measures) these programmes have not yet been sufficiently and rigorously enough assessed. Generally, few randomized clinical trials have been done with entrepreneurship support programmes, and they few that have been done does not provide much encouragement that these programme really work. In fact, a rigorous impact study of one of the EUs largest entrepreneurship support programmes found that the programme in fact discouraged participants from becoming entrepreneurs!
In addition to much more research on and evaluation of entrepreneurship policies, Professor Naudé also pointed out that governments and donors need themselves to stand critical towards their stance towards entrepreneurship promotion. Specifically, they should recognized that (i) not all entrepreneurship matter – most entrepreneurs are not innovative, do not create many jobs and do not grow their firms; (ii) most people do not want to be entrepreneurs but rather want to be wage employment – the countries with the lowest job satisfaction in Europe are also those with the highest business ownership rates and vice versa; (iii) programmes needs to be tailored to take into account heterogeneity on the national/country level, regional level and on the firm level – but this tailoring implies a certain level of targeting or selectivity, which in turn implies risk-taking, something that governments are not good at.
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