JDE IS GOING TO FOUR ISSUES!

Abstract

The December 2005 edition of the Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship (JDE) includes a collection of impressive scholarly works. This issue represents a milestone for the Journal. Beginning with the next issue, the JDE will be published four times a year. It’s another step toward making our publication one of the premier vehicles for scholarly research in entrepreneurship. Thank you all for your support! The first contribution is by Johan Lambrecht and Ellen Beens. Their article, Poverty Among Self-Employed Businesspeople in a Rich Country: A Misunderstood and Distinct Reality, deals with a very complicated and multifaceted topic, poverty. Their perspective is very interesting and their findings for Belgium reveal that approximately one quarter of the self-employed are below the poverty line and that income distribution among the self-employed is very unequal. Poverty among self-employed businesspeople seems to be something distinct from other forms of poverty! Michael Harris, Lee Grubb and Fred Hebert investigate Critical Problems of Rural Small Businesses: A Comparison of African-American and White-owned Formation and Early Growth Firms. Their study examines the most critical types of problems encountered by these businesses and the relationship between the types of problems reported and the owner’s race and firm’s developmental stage. Strategic problems were found to be the most critical problems encountered, regardless of race or developmental stage, followed by administrative and operations. No significant relationship was found between the type of problems and the owner’s race, but a significant relationship was found between problem type and the firm’s developmental stage; businesses in the formation stage were more likely to encounter strategic problems, while early growth firms more often experienced administrative problems. Howard Rasheed’s study, Turnaround Strategies for Declining Small Business: The Effects of Performance and Resources, explores the choice between growth and retrenchment as turnaround strategies for small business owners experiencing decline in performance. He concludes that small business owners/managers remain aggressive when faced with adverse conditions. In his study, Medhi Salehizadeh examines the impact of economic and financial factors on venture capital investments for a group of emerging countries. In his Venture Capital Investments in Emerging Economies: An Empirical Analysis, he finds that GDP per capita,