While extensively explored as a solution to poverty at the base of the pyramid, this is the first in-depth examination of entrepreneurship and the poor within advanced economies. The authors explore the underlying nature of poverty and draw implications for new venture creation. Entrepreneurship is presented as a source of empowerment that represents an alternative pathway out of poverty.

Making Poor Nations Rich illustrates the importance of institutions that support economic freedom and private property rights for promoting the form of productive entrepreneurship that leads to sustained increases in countries' standard of living.

In Entrepreneurship and Sustainability the editors and contributors challenge the notion that not-for-profit social entrepreneurship is the only sort that can lead to the alleviation of poverty. Entrepreneurship for profit is not just about the entrepreneur doing well. Entrepreneurs worldwide are leading successful for-profit ventures which contribute to poverty alleviation in their communities. With the challenge of global poverty before them, entrepreneurs continue to develop innovative, business-oriented ventures that deliver promising solutions to this complex and urgent agenda. This book explores how to bring commercial investors together with those who are best placed to reach the poorest customers. With case studies from around the World, the focus of the contributions is on the new breed of entrepreneurs who are blending a profit motive with a desire to make a difference in their communities and beyond borders. A number of the contributions here also recognize that whilst much research has been devoted to poverty alleviation in developing countries, this is only part of the story. Studies in this volume also focus upon enterprise solutions to poverty in pockets of significant deprivation in high-income countries, such as the Appalachia region of the US, in parts of Europe, and the richer Asian countries. Much has been written about the achievements of socially orientated non-profit microfinance institutions. This valuable, academically rigorous but accessible book will help academics, policy makers, and business people consider what the next generation of more commercially orientated banks for the 'bottom billion' might look like.

Over the past two decades, the percentage of the world’s population living on less than a dollar a day has been cut in half. How much of that improvement is because of—or in spite of—globalization? While anti-globalization activists mount loud critiques and the media report breathlessly on globalization’s perils and promises, economists have largely remained silent, in part because of an entrenched institutional divide between those who study poverty and those who study trade and finance. Globalization and Poverty bridges that gap, bringing together experts on both international trade and poverty to provide a detailed view of the effects of globalization on the poor in developing nations, answering such questions as: Do lower import tariffs improve the lives of the poor? Has increased financial integration led to more or less poverty? How have the poor fared during various currency crises? Does food aid hurt or help the poor? Poverty, the contributors show here, has been used as a popular and convenient catchphrase by parties on both sides of the globalization debate to further their respective arguments. Globalization and Poverty provides the more nuanced understanding necessary to move that debate beyond the slogans.

What circumstances or behaviors turn poverty into a cycle that perpetuates across generations? The answer to this question carries especially important implications for the design and evaluation of policies and projects intended to reduce poverty. Yet a major challenge analysts and policymakers face in understanding poverty traps is the sheer number of mechanisms—not just financial, but also environmental, physical, and psychological—that may contribute to the persistence of poverty all over the world. The research in this volume explores the hypothesis that poverty is self-reinforcing because the equilibrium behaviors of the poor perpetuate low standards of living. Contributions explore the dynamic, complex processes by which households accumulate assets and increase their productivity and earnings potential, as well as the conditions under which some individuals, groups, and economies struggle to escape poverty. Investigating the full range of phenomena that combine to generate poverty traps—gleaned from behavioral, health, and resource economics as well as the sociology, psychology, and environmental literatures—chapters in this volume also present new evidence that highlights both the insights and the limits of a poverty trap lens. The framework introduced in this volume provides a robust platform for studying well-being dynamics in developing economies.

References: p.403-415.

The U.S. is home to some of the largest corporations on the planet. American entrepreneurs spawned massive companies such as Facebook, Google, Apple, Amazon, and Oracle. Founders of these companies became very wealthy. Government entities and consumers benefited from the unmarketable products entrepreneurial visionaries developed. Entrepreneurship and Economic Development: The People and their Environment provides in-depth case studies of contemporary entrepreneurs that are building the future. The author argues that the famous billionaire entrepreneurs of today such as Gates, Bezos, Zuckerberg, Bloomberg, Page, Brin, Ellison and others possessed individual drive and talent. However, it is also argued that talent may not be enough. Talent withers or thrives in its social, cultural, political and legal environment. The environment of the U.S. and its entrepreneurial "ecosystem" has been conducive to innovators and entrepreneurs of the past such as Benjamin Franklin, Levi Strauss, Henry Ford, and Andrew Carnegie and Thomas Edison. This book explores how both talent and context influence entrepreneurial development.

This essential collection contains the most influential articles written over the past two decades that help us to understand the role of entrepreneurs in the development process, both theoretically and empirically. These important papers span a wide methodological range, from theoretical models, over cross-country studies, to firm- and household-level studies, utilizing both regression analysis and simulation techniques. Professor Beck has written an insightful introduction which provides an overview of the area of entrepreneurship in developing countries.

The author describes his vision for an innovative business model that would combine the power of free markets with a quest for a more humane, egalitarian world that could help alleviate world poverty, inequality, and other social problems.

The Routledge Handbook of Entrepreneurship in Developing Economies is a landmark volume that offers a uniquely comprehensive overview of entrepreneurship in developing countries. Addressing the multi-faceted nature of entrepreneurship, chapters explore a vast range of subject areas including education, economic policy, gender and the prevalence and nature of informal sector entrepreneurship. In order to understand the process of new venture creation in developing economies, what it means to be engaged in entrepreneurship in a developing world context must be addressed. This handbook does so by exploring the difficulties, risks and rewards associated with being an entrepreneur, and evaluates the impacts of the environment, relationships, performance and policy dynamics on small and entrepreneurial firms in developing economies. The handbook brings together a unique collection of over forty international researchers who are all actively engaged in studying entrepreneurship in a developing world context. The chapters offer concise but detailed perspectives and explanations on key aspects of the subject across a diverse array of developing economies, spanning Africa, Asia, Latin America and Eastern Europe. In doing so, the chapters highlight the heterogeneity of entrepreneurship in developed economies, and contribute to the on-going policy discourses for managing and promoting entrepreneurial growth in the developing world. The book will be of great interest to scholars, students and policymakers in the areas of development economics, business and management, public policy and development studies.