1. Introduction
Entrepreneurship is commonly considered an engine of innovation and social growth, but it does not happen in a vacuum. More so, different environments can bring different realities in societies, meaning the degree of entrepreneurship is not always consistent due to the variability within the factors that make it a feasible option.
For example, we can find variability between Chile, which enjoys extremely high Total Early-Stage Entrepreneurial Activity (TEA) 25.06 and development, and its neighbor, Argentina, creator of many of the prominent enterprises in Latin America, which has declining (and currently extremely low) TEA values and entrepreneurial spirit, according to the latest Global Entrepreneurship Monitor report (
GEM 2018). Nonetheless, comprising of a heavily educated population (
Pradilla 2012) and newly-implanted law called Entrepreneur’s Law, similar to Chile’s Law of Business in One Day, Argentina follows its neighbor’s footsteps to improve its entrepreneurship ecosystem (
Cruz 2017).
On the other hand other countries like Panama, while showing sub-standard entrepreneurial intentions, perceived capabilities and TEA, in relation to their regional neighbors, show a substantially higher motivational index due to their attempts to promote entrepreneurship through business accelerators like Micro, Small and Medium Sized Business Authority (AMPYME). Contrary to logic, highly developed, innovation-stage countries with high links to Latin America, like Spain, due to economic constraints and high bureaucracy, show substantially lower values than previously mentioned countries.
In sum, each country’s context creates different, ever-changing, entrepreneurship realities, which also translate to attitudes. Because of this, it is important to understand and regularly assess the entrepreneurial mindset within different geo-political structures, instead of using a one-size-fits-all model to explain the entrepreneurship reality in each. This is also specifically relevant in educational settings, which is commonly attributed part of the entrepreneurship activity given its nature to train and create knowledge, which translates to spillover and spin-offs (
Acs et al. 1994;
Caiazza et al. 2014). Most of these countries also share the status of being developing countries, which entrepreneurship has shown to reduce poverty of, more so through education (
Khadeeja et al. 2017)
This article comes as a response to further understand and update the variability of entrepreneurial attitudes and how they impact intentions, analyzing models using a trans-national framework by exploring to what degree people’s motives for entrepreneurship, as well their perceived behavioral control and social support impact intentions for business in four different countries: Argentina, Chile, Panama, and Spain.
This article structure is as follows: In
Section 2, we present our literature review on the importance of entrepreneurship, intention models, as well as attitudes. In
Section 3, we describe our sample, scale, and delineate the method used, followed by
Section 4 with the results. Lastly, in
Section 5, we discuss our results and suggest future research directions.
5. Conclusions and Future Work
Results show that there is variability in attitudes between countries in almost all variables. The only non-significant differences come between Argentina and Chile in PBC, and in entrepreneurial motivations: Argentina with Panama and Spain; Panama with the rest of the countries, Chile with Panama; and Spain with Argentina and Panama. This means that, at the least, they all share a similar (and high) overview of entrepreneurship as means to obtain personal goals.
Panama’s students rank higher than the other three countries regarding their sense of controllability and efficacy of potential entrepreneurial endeavors, have higher intentions, and as well perceive higher social support. This can be contextually reasoned, as there is a boom in promoting business development in the country (
GEM 2017), and this could be a reflection of these endeavors. Ironically, these attitudes are not reflected in the general population, since the latest GEM report ranks them in Panama lower than the regional average, suggesting the student population could be having a different reality towards business than the rest. Also, although belonging to the same region as Chile, which ranks higher in most entrepreneurship assessment categories (
GEM 2018), students from Panama rank higher as well.
The biggest difference comes from Spain’s low intentions in relationship to the rest of the countries studied by more than one point. This was somewhat expected, as Spain has not fully recovered from its economic recession. These could be due to Spain’s highly bureaucratic system, medium to low perceptions of entrepreneurship as a feasible career, and difficulty in finding financial resources (
Guerrero et al. 2016). This difference does not come in just intentions, but in subjective norm and perceived behavioral control as well by a similar one-point margin.
Regression showed most attitudes have a significant, positive relationship with entrepreneurial intentions, except subjective norm in Argentina and Chile, thus, we reject Hypothesis 2. Subjective norm, as previously mentioned, has shown to be inconsistent in intention-based models (
Autio et al. 2001;
Krueger et al. 2000;
Tiwari et al. 2017). This study also supports this, and shows other’s valuation towards entrepreneurship is circumstantially relevant to intentions.
Intention-based studies generally show PBC to predict the strongest (
Ajzen 2002), but in Chile and Panama, the highest regression coefficient comes from motivations, suggesting entrepreneurial spirit may currently hold a stronger effect on intentions than perceived capabilities in some countries. In fact, according to the latest GEM report, Panama has a high motivational drive towards business. This study confirms this on the student population. The same goes for Chile, suggesting they are highly spirit-driven.
Lastly, entrepreneurship intentions can also sometimes be regarded as a long term plan. For example, The Global University Entrepreneurial Spirit Students’ Survey (GUESS)’s 2016 national reports found that in Panama, only 18% of the sampled student population were considering starting business right after graduation, but their score for entrepreneurship intentions was actually quite high (5.9 on a scale of 7). These contradictory results are actually explained by the fact that their entrepreneurship interests are projected at least five years after graduation. Considering this timeframe, 61.7% expect to be business founders. This almost doubles Argentina’s score of 38.2% in a 5 year projection, 8.8% after college, and is also higher than Chile’s 52.3% five year projection, 8.2 after graduation. There was no report from Spain available by the time of this article, so we cannot contrast their scores. Nonetheless, we suspect they would be low as well.
Finding similar patterns in our study for in intention scores, we also suspect our sample answered in a similar fashion, where entrepreneurship intentions are not considered in the immediate post-university future, but as a process that expects to be accomplished in at least a five year timeframe. As such, we also expect these intention scores to represent at least the next five years of business activity in these countries, which positions Spain at a concerning (but expected) low progress for business in the future, and the other three countries at an increased and noticeable progress, Panama ranking highest, and with the most potential.
5.1. Contribution to Scientific Literature and Policies
This study uses a cross-national approach to further understand the dynamics between certain entrepreneurship attitudes and the intention to start business. Statistically-wise, most attitudes differ between these countries, but the degree in which they would pursue entrepreneurship for their personal goals is fairly consistent. This suggest entrepreneurship still holds potential to flourish, as entrepreneurship motivations ranked high and, in some of the countries studied, their regressions themselves to intentions were quite high, and in all countries, significant.
5.2. Implications for Future Policies
The results obtained from this study leads to some recommendations for future policies, specifically on the administration side:
This calls to take action, primarily at the competence stage, as the main objective should be to promote the feasibility of entrepreneurship. Given our educational context, our main suggestion would be to tap into this existing overview of entrepreneurship as means to potentiate student’s interest in business by making programs not only more visible, but also appealing. For example, funding platforms like Crowdfunding, which dampen geographical barriers (
Agrawal et al. 2011), would be a good starting point to get students not only to move creatively, but to take control of their projects and explore their business interests at an international scale.
This population may have a tendency towards small business, specifically in countries with high unemployment levels and economic stress (
Hofstede et al. 2004). We recommend for policies and programs to consider focusing on these type of ventures, especially through public initiatives and funding. This study showed that Panama, which is currently promoting and forming small and medium business accelerators, has shown the highest value of the variables studied. We did not specifically prove their accelerator programs are the reason for these high values, but should be strongly considered as a hint and as a possible query for future studies, and a possibly confounding variable for their current positive perception and intentions for business.
Entrepreneurship should be strengthened at the institutional level with the inclusion of industry-university collaboration, which could potentially lead to spinoff creation. Some authors have found this relates to local regional development (
Bonaccorsi et al. 2013), which could be beneficial for the developing countries used in this study, as well Spain, which counts as innovation-driven.
Curricula should include mandatory entrepreneurship courses.
Israr and Saleem (
2018) found a strong relation between entrepreneurship education and intentions, and Hernández-Sánchez et al. 2019 found it relates to TEA values, which means entrepreneurship education has a significant impact in societal development, and could benefit from further increasing intentions, especially in Spain. Results show motivations for business is a common characteristic to these countries, and us believe the exposure to these programs would allow students to hone their required skills and further increase intentions.
5.3. Limitations and Future Directions
This study further expands on entrepreneurial literature by gauging the relationship between attitudes and entrepreneurship, and whether intention models hold fixed interactions, or some are moderated by context. We used some variables that are common in entrepreneurship research for this, but there is a myriad of other possibilities that could impact intentions. To improve on this literature, we believe future research could focus on whether these attitudes stem because of entrepreneurship educational programs, and to what extent the visibility and experience of these inspire other attitudes and cognitions, such as knowledge, passion for business, and identity, as it states how much a person believes it “fits” as an entrepreneur. This can also be further studied by grouping variables, such as gender and study field.
We also recommend to include which type of business students are interested in forming. Like previously mentioned in
Section 5.2, small business programs and policies could be part of what is driving these positive attitudes as well. It would be useful to explore whether this is causally related to higher intentions, in order to identify what certain types of business should be promoted the strongest in an educational context.
Subjective norm, given its inconsistent effect, we believe should be accompanied by another variable that measures institutional support, as
Arrighetti et al. (
2016) found certain environments, such as economic stress, make this variable salient for intentions. It could also help explaining the direction in which it predicts intentions in accordance to how supportive our bureaucratic institutions are in different countries.