Culture, productivity and competitiveness: disentangling the concepts

Influence of national and regional level social capital on entrepreneurial activity

Purpose

The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence that national levels of social capital have on entrepreneurial activity. Specifically, we argue that national and regional level social capital positively influences the ability of entrepreneurs to mobilize and access important resources thereby positively impacting the rate of entrepreneurship within nations and regions.

Design/methodology/approach

We advance a multilevel and multidimensional conceptualization of social capital. Then based on a dataset of 68 nations and 665 within-nation regions, we empirically evaluate the effects of social capital at the national and regional level in explaining differences in entrepreneurial activity across nations and regions using a combination of regression analysis and multilevel hierarchical linear modeling (HLM).

Findings

Our findings emphasize the importance of formulating a multilevel conceptualization of social capital for entrepreneurship research. We discuss the results, provide implications for public policy and suggest avenues for future research.

Originality/value

The overwhelming majority of entrepreneurship research focused on investigating the implications of social capital reside at the individual level of analysis. Our unique inquiry is an inaugural effort to consider this important implications at the macro and meso-level of analysis by examining both regional and national-level effects.

Science Mapping: A Scientometric Review on Resource Curses, Dutch Diseases, and Conflict Resources during 1993–2020

Over the past few decades, the wealth of Africa has not made African wealthy. There is a voicing that Africa is cursed, whether richly poor or poorly rich. Sub-Saharan Africa is commonplace for political turbulence, as well as humanitarian and economic misery. In such a catastrophic situa-tion, political economics studies have focused on the Resource Curses, Dutch Diseases, and Con-flict Resources in this area. A systematic scientometric analysis of this field would be beneficial but is currently lacking in the academic literature. Using VOSviewer and CiteSpace, this review fills the void by analyzing the 1783 articles published in the WoS SSCI Collection between 1993 and 2020 on the “Resource Curses”, “Dutch Diseases”, and “Conflict Resources”. The author dis-cusses recent papers with disruptive potential, references with the most robust citation explora-tions, and cooperation networks between authors and institutes. Three hotspots were detected: the causes and effects of the Resource curses; the interaction among the Resource Curses, Dutch Diseases, and Conflict Resources; the factors that affect rent collection and regime resilience. While the literature on the “Resource curse” and “Dutch Disease” has been around longer, studies on “Conflict Resources” are picking up quickly. Conflict Resources were characterized by active citation exploration keywords and multiple active co-citation clusters, including possibly groundbreaking articles. There is a massive overlap between the three strings of literature, but each one has its emphasis.