How entrepreneurs identify opportunities and access to external financing in Tunisian’s micro-enterprises?

Abstract

Micro-enterprises play an extremely important role in the development of any country, especially in developing countries. To understand entrepreneurs who operate in a low-technology industry and in a low financial resources, we rely on the network and human perspective on entrepreneurship. In this paper, we investigate how the social and human capital of entrepreneurs influences their ability to identify opportunities and access to external financing. In this paper, we extends prior research in two ways. First, by introducing the context of micro-entreprises which has been marginalized in the entrepreneurship research. Second, to our knowledge, there is a very small number of studies that have investigated theorically and empirically the access to external financial capital especially at the level of small businesses. In this regard, we propose to measure the access to external financial capital by the access to bank financing, that is, in terms of the ease in obtaining a credit. Key words: Entrepreneurial opportunity, external financing, micro-entreprises, human capital, social capital.