Necessity- and opportunity-based female entrepreneurship across countries: The configurational impact of country-level institutions

Abstract

This study proposes an integrative framework for analyzing the interdependence of multiple institutional supports for necessity- and opportunity-based female entrepreneurship across countries. The proposed framework incorporates three streams of national institutional systems to capture cross-country variations in national economic institutions, social welfare systems, and socio-cultural attitudes that jointly promote both types of female entrepreneurship. We conducted a fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis of data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor, which covered 150 country-year observations for 65 countries between 2011 and 2014. The findings suggest that while the two types of female entrepreneurship are associated with different configurations of national institutional supports, there are multiple equifinal pathways for each type to prosper. This study enriches the literature on female entrepreneurship by explicating its institutional embeddedness across countries, thus providing policymakers with important policy implications for supporting female entrepreneurship.