The Role of Ghana’s Macro Environment in Ethnic Migrants Self-Employment Entrepreneurial Motivation

Abstract

This study examines the role of Ghana’s macro environmental factors on the entrepreneurial motivation of self-employed ethnic migrants. It analyses the effect of context on motivation, by focusing on the six PESTLE variables, as predictors for each of the eight distinct dimensions of entrepreneurial motivation factors, identified through an initial factor analysis of the generated survey data. We tested five hypotheses to determine the association between macro-environmental factors, and the entrepreneurial motivation of the respondents. Following data analysis and interpretation, two hypotheses comprising H2, and H3 were supported. Thus, our results show a statistically significant positive correlation between Ghana’s economic environment (i.e. H2), including its social context (i.e. H3), and the self-employment entrepreneurial motivation of the study’s respondents, as hypothesised. However, three hypotheses, consisting of H1, H4, and H5, were partially supported. The new insights derived from the findings constitute this paper’s contribution to the existing knowledge, and the entrepreneurship literature. Also, the paper’s scope and focus positions it as one of the first studies, or probably it could be the first study that has empirically analysed the impact of Ghana’s macro-contextual factors on the entrepreneurial motivation of internal ethnic migrant entrepreneurs. Furthermore, our exclusive focus on external macro-environmental factors contained in PESTLE models, which were rigorously analysed to determine their impact on entrepreneurial motivation, is a departure from the frequent analysis of the personality of entrepreneurs, and internal factors within an enterprise. Thus, from the ensuing, we make both a methodological contribution, and additions to the structural theory approach of entrepreneurship.