Determinants of Nascent Social Entrepreneurship

This cross-national investigation attempts to explore environmental factors that facilitate nascent social entrepreneurial activities, from a macro-level perspective. It makes use of numerous literatures as well as the institutional economics framework to test for both formal (public spending) and informal (post-materialism, education) variables. Utilizing data from the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) report of 2009, this paper tested multiple hypotheses with the help of five regression analyses. It was concluded that public spending had no bearing on the prevalence of nascent social ventures. While education suggested a noteworthy impact only when assessed for independent effects, post-materialism consistently illustrated a statistically significant influence on the aforementioned dependent variable. These results signaled towards the importance of socially constructed norms and self-expression value systems, rather than legislative regulations established by governmental institutions. In other words, informal institutions remained an integral element in furthering nascent social entrepreneurship, while such social start-ups did not seem to extract any benefits from changes in the formal institutional structure.