Women Entrepreneurs in Lebanon: Obstacles, Potential, and Prospects

Kamal Hamdan, Redha Hamdan, Lara Batlouni and Nisrine Mansour

Chapter 8 in Women, Work and Welfare in the Middle East and North Africa:The Role of Socio-demographics, Entrepreneurship and Public Policies, 2016, pp 195-234 from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.

Abstract: Lebanon's institutional and legal framework for small enterprises is one of gender equality. Yet women's legal status is still considered inferior to that of men by Lebanon's religious personal status courts, and a lack of reform in personal status laws considerably affects women and, especially, women entrepreneurs. Women's economic participation tends to be limited, characterized by gendered career choices, limited technical skills, and early exit from the labor force at marriage. Enterprises led by women have developed less favorably than those led by men. A sample survey of nearly 3,000 micro and small enterprises (8 percent of them led by women) shows that those run by women are mostly crowded together in the trade sector, tend to be very small, experience tougher competition than men's businesses, and achieve profitability only two-thirds that of men's. Women make very little use of business support services and also have more difficulty with taxes and tax administration, and with customs duties. Recommendations are made to increase women's access to vital business skills and to create a more favorable environment for women-owned small- and medium-size enterprises.

Keywords: Middle East and North Africa; Women's Welfare; Gender Studies (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2016
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/pdf/10.1142/9781783267347_0008 (application/pdf)
https://www.worldscientific.com/doi/abs/10.1142/9781783267347_0008 (text/html)
Ebook Access is available upon purchase.

Related works:
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:wsi:wschap:9781783267347_0008

Ordering information: This item can be ordered from

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in World Scientific Book Chapters from World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Tai Tone Lim ().