Emprendimiento en El Salvador: La Inseguridad Ciudadana como barrera

Abstract

[EN] Over the past few years, interest in entrepreneurship has been growing due to its contribution to economic growth, productivity growth, and the rejuvenation of social and productive networks. However, under the Local Economic Development, following the Sustainable Human Development paradigm, the entrepreneur becomes a key actor for his or her territory's development, highlighting his or her contribution from an integral vision of development, far beyond the mere wealth creation and economic growth. Stimulating the creation of High Potential Firms (HPF), capable of generating jobs, innovation and high value added products and services, becomes the main goal in the knowledge based economies context. Only a few literature is available concerning Latin America's entrepreneurial activity. This fact contrasts strongly with the results of some studies that highlight its potential. Latin America's entrepreneurship index is one of the highest of the world, but this is not reflected in its citizens' welfare, which is below the levels of other emerging regions. This is the case of the Central American republic of El Salvador, which shows high necessity driven entrepreneurship and high business failure rates. Entrepreneurship barriers, suffered by the local entrepreneurs, may appear from internal factors (such as age, gender, educational level, motivation, etc?) or external factors (such as social, economic and cultural environment, etc?). The country's high citizen insecurity rates may turn into a major threat to entrepreneurial activity. Consequently, the main objective of this Thesis is to provide more information about the barriers that hinder the correct development of entrepreneurial activity, specially a country with high citizen insecurity rates such as El Salvador, and within the Local Economic Development framework. By the means of an Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP), applied to the answers of an expert panel, the main barriers to entrepreneurship in El Salvador have been hierarchized. Then, the crisp set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (csQCA) has been applied to El Salvador's 2012 GEM database, in order to analyze the effects of several internal and external factors in business failure. Finally, a fuzzy set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) has been applied to El Salvador's 2014 GEM database, in order to identify the variables that affect the High Performance Firm (HPF) creation within the country. The results highlight that the three main barriers an entrepreneur has to face in El Salvador are his educational level, his social environment and citizen insecurity (both objective and subjective). Furthermore, the results show that the use of formal advisory services when creating a firm strongly correlates with the subsequent success of the business, as opposed to the exclusive use of informal advisory services. In addition, the educational level of the entrepreneur is an essential factor for business success. However, the offering of innovative products and/or services is not enough to guarantee the…