Legal Context and Support Incentives of Social Enterprises in Baltic Countries

Abstract

Background: All three Baltic countries: Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania, faced similar historical contexts and challenges. Currently, Baltic countries have created a favourable environment for entrepreneurship and have an active civil society sector. However, the social enterprise sector in the Baltic states is very young and still developing. Baltic countries have great potential for developing and expanding social enterprises through various support infrastructures. The solutions implemented to support the development of social enterprises differ in all three countries.
 Research objectives: This article aims to identify social entrepreneurship support incentives in Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania.
 Research design and methods: The paper uses literature review, document analysis, and comparative analysis results.
 Results: The study revealed that all three Baltic states are gradually taking steps towards establishing a social enterprise ecosystem. However, Estonia and Lithuania lack supportive legal frameworks and tax support systems for SEs. The development of supportive regulatory environments could help to grow the sector and solve many conceptual issues.
 Conclusions: The governments could, therefore, adopt a legal regulation and a clear definition of SEs to build a shared understanding of the field between all sectors and to implement future governmental strategies with identified coordinating structures, roles, and missions of SEs for far more successful collaboration.