Drivers of growth in Tunisia: young firms vs incumbents

Hassan Arouri, Adel Ben Youssef, Francesco Quatraro and Marco Vivarelli ()
Additional contact information
Hassan Arouri: National Institute of Statistics

Small Business Economics, 2020, vol. 54, issue 1, No 16, 323-340

Abstract: Abstract The aim of this paper is to investigate the growth dynamics of young small firms (in contrast with larger and older incumbents) in a developing country context, using a unique and comprehensive dataset of non-agricultural Tunisian companies. Our results suggest that significant differences between young and mature firms can be found as far as the drivers of their growth are concerned. The key finding being that—while consistently with the extant literature Gibrat’s law is overall rejected—the negative impact of the initial size is significantly larger for young than mature firms. This result has interesting policy implications: since smaller young firms are particularly conducive to employment generation, they can be considered good candidate for targeted accompanying policies addressed to sustain their post-entry growth.

Keywords: Firm’s growth; Young firms; Gibrat’s law; Tunisia (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L26 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (6)

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s11187-018-00133-6 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: Drivers of growth in Tunisia: young firms vs incumbents (2020)
Working Paper: Drivers of growth in Tunisia: Young firms vs incumbents (2018)
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:kap:sbusec:v:54:y:2020:i:1:d:10.1007_s11187-018-00133-6

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... 29/journal/11187/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s11187-018-00133-6

Access Statistics for this article

Small Business Economics is currently edited by Zoltan J. Acs and David B. Audretsch

More articles in Small Business Economics from Springer
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().