Skills and Youth Entrepreneurship in Africa: Analysis with Evidence from Swaziland

Zuzana Brixiová Schwidrowski, Mthuli Ncube () and Zorobabel Bicaba ()

World Development, 2015, vol. 67, issue C, 11-26

Abstract: The shortage of entrepreneurial skills has lowered search effectiveness of potential young entrepreneurs and the rate of youth start-ups. This paper contributes to closing a gap in the literature on entrepreneurship and development by developing a model of costly firm creation with skill differences between young and adult entrepreneurs. The model shows that for young entrepreneurs facing high costs of search for business opportunities, support for training is more effective in stimulating productive start-ups than subsidies. The case for interventions targeted at youth rises in societies with high costs of youth unemployment. We test the role of skills and training for youth entrepreneurship on data from a recent survey of entrepreneurs in Swaziland.

Keywords: youth entrepreneurship; model of skills and structural transformation; policies; Africa (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (71)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305750X14002927
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
Working Paper: Skills and Youth Entrepreneurship in Africa: Analysis with Evidence from Swaziland (2014)
Working Paper: Skills and Youth Entrepreneurship in Africa: Analysis with evidence from Swaziland (2014)
Working Paper: Skills and youth entrepreneurship in Africa: Analysis with evidence from Swaziland (2014)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:wdevel:v:67:y:2015:i:c:p:11-26

DOI: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2014.09.027

Access Statistics for this article

World Development is currently edited by O. T. Coomes

More articles in World Development from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().