Suchergebnisse

In this paper we analyse the role of government in relation to the development of entrepreneurship in countries where private business activity was illegal until the beginning of the 1990s. By focusing on Estonia and Belarus we are concerned with countries with an ostensibly similar political heritage, yet with contrasting experiences during the post-Soviet period. Various authors have argued the need for entrepreneurship research to acknowledge the heterogeneity of environmental conditions, outcomes, and behaviours that exist with respect to entrepreneurship. Government policies and actions are a key element contributing to the heterogeneity of external conditions in which entrepreneurship occurs and are thus part of social embeddedness. The findings have implications for policy makers in transition and developing countries by emphasising the variety of ways in which the state can influence the nature and pace of private business development and the central role of institutional behaviour in this process. The findings also have implications for researchers interested in extending analysis of entrepreneurship into a wide range of business environments.

AbstractWe examine the developments in trade patterns between the former Soviet republics in the years following the initial breakup shock. After a huge fall following the Soviet breakup of the early 1990s, Commonwealth of Independent States (CIS) trade with Russia began improving, and there have been recent formal efforts at Eurasian Economic Integration. This might be taken, a priori, as contrary to the hypothesis of gradual decline in Head, Mayer and Ries (HMR in J Int Econ 81(1):1–14, 2010)—or perhaps as evidence of the power of restored trade agreements, such as the incipient Eurasian Economic Union. We decompose the region's trade into theory-consistent 'gravity' components, in order to analyze dynamic changes in the components since the Soviet era. Despite the sharp falls after 1991, trade in 1995 still shows strong ties, consistent with high dyadic (country pair) components linked to trade specialization. By contrast, in the second decade, the ties (dyads) began to weaken significantly and calibrated trade costs tend to rise, despite attempts at renewed integration. Rather, the sharp improvement in trade volumes was mainly due to the sharp recoveries in GDP levels for both Russia and many of the Central Asian Countries, associated with improvements in the global economy and economic ties with the World (especially with EU and China). We would therefore conclude that the recovery in trade between Russia and Central Asia reflects monadic factors (i.e., the regional economic recovery) and does not contradict the HMR (2010) hypothesis. Nevertheless, further, dynamic analysis shows that there are strong long-run ties within the CIS and Russia, which are not declining, and that sticky post-colonial adjustment does not appear set to eliminate the current bias of trade between these republics.