Will Small Business Be the Answer for Developing Economies
质疑小企业和创业能引领发展中经济体经济发展的普遍乐观看法，指出缺乏系统研究支持，并讨论跨文化推广经济发展模式的两大问题：数据不可比和忽视创业发展模型。
WILL SMALL BUSINESS BE THE ANSWER FOR DEVELOPING ECONOMIES? There is great excitement in small business circles about political, social, and economic developments taking place around the world. Of particular interest are developments in Eastern Europe leading toward the establishment of market-based economies. Many people are anticipating that small business and entrepreneurship will lead the way to new economic development in heretofore tightly controlled systems. In this note, I shall attempt to identify some reasons why I think the excitement about entrepreneurship and economic development should be tempered a bit. While the positive link between economic development and entrepreneurship has been supported in the United States (Birch 1987), I am not aware of similar research systematically demonstrating the relationship in developing economies. While this does not suggest that a positive relationship may not exist in other countries, there is no reason to believe it does until appropriate research and analysis have been undertaken. Recent International Notes in this journal have illustrated some of the difficulties of small business development in Ecuador (Busch 1989) and Peru (Dana 1988). In both notes, the authors observed dramatic differences between developed and undeveloped economies and the resulting problems for entrepreneurship and small business. A broad assumption that there are similarities in economic development processes across developed and developing economies would seem to be both ethnocentric and unsubstantiated. At least two major problems are encountered when attempting to generalize economic development trends to other cultures. The first is that significant differences exist in available economic data in developed and developing economies. In the United States, for example, economic data in the forms of Standard Industry Classifications, employment security data, demographic data, and private databases (e.g., lifestyle analyses developed by marketing research firms) are widely available. Anyone who has worked in developing economies such as those in Latin America and Asia knows that such sophisticated data not only do not exist, but that there is little basis for expecting collection of such data in the near future. There are many reasons the data do not exist, and the reasons probably vary from country to country. A discussion of those reasons may be the subject of another note. The point here is that the assumption that developing economies will experience similar relationships between economic development and entrepreneurship as those in developed economies may not be warranted. Without comparable data across cultures, it is difficult to make credible cross-cultural comparisons. A second problem which emerges when attempting to generalize economic development trends from one economy to another is the lack of consideration of current models of entrepreneurship development. Plaschka and Welsch (1990), for example, suggest that the development of entrepreneurship is the result of coordination of internal and external components facing the entrepreneur. Internal components include factors such as: individual characteristics of entrepreneurs, characteristics of the location, characteristics of employees, financial resources, and firm characteristics such as systems of production, oraganization, and marketing. External components include factors such as: governments, taxes, laws, regulations, and free trade policies; location infrastructure and the existence of enterprise zones; the availability of a skilled labor force; the presence of venture capital, government loans and grants; and the presence of supporting institutions and systems, including universities, research facilities, public and private partnerships, networking and cooperative support between entrepreneurs. …