OBJECTIVE Several countries in sub-Saharan Africa have implemented policies to remove or reduce user fees. Our aim was to identify criteria guiding such decisions among national policy entrepreneurs, those who link up problem definition, solution development and political processes. METHODS We administered a best-worst scaling (BWS) experiment to 89 policy entrepreneurs, asking them to identi...

In response to a nationwide rise in obesity, several states have passed legislation to improve school health environments. Among these was Arkansas's Act 1220 of 2003, the most comprehensive school-based childhood obesity legislation at that time. We used the Multiple Streams Framework to analyze factors that brought childhood obesity to the forefront of the Arkansas legislative agenda and resu...

Entrepreneurship policy mainly aims to promote innovative Schumpeterian entrepreneurship. However, the rate of entrepreneurship is commonly proxied using quantity-based metrics, such as small business activity, the self-employment rate, or the number of startups. We argue that those metrics give rise to misleading inferences regarding high-impact Schumpeterian entrepreneurship. To unambiguously...

This paper examines the interaction between intellectual property protection and competition policy on the choice of entrepreneurs with respect to commercialization as well as the rate of innovation. We find that stronger intellectual property protection makes it more likely that entrepreneurs will commercialize by cooperating with incumbents rather than competing with them. Consequently, we de...

Policy entrepreneurs are individuals who attempt to influence the policy process and its outcomes through their opportunistic or incremental actions. Their success in the policy-making process has been associated with the convergence of four factors: behavioural traits; institutional factors; network position and political capital. Policy entrepreneurs have received little study in low- and mid...

One policy making issue that needs to be addressed more effectively through an intergovernmental and participatory approach is entrepreneurship policy. Entrepreneurship is an area where interdependencies are very high, and the establishment of collaborative relationships such as networks is vital. Therefore, a network approach in the entrepreneurial policy-making process, which leads to the inv...

The article presents evidence from SMME entrepreneurs regarding their experiences on economic issues which impact negatively on their sustainability. The inception of the democratic government resulted in the fast boom of small, medium and micro enterprises (SMMEs) due to the introduction black economic empowerment (BEE) initiatives. Using structured questionnaires, the data were collected by p...

The paper describes the results of an empirical study of some business environment factors impact on risk taking decision-making of entrepreneurs on the basis of individual entrepreneurial judgments. Multiple regression analysis is used to interpret data collected from 382 micro-entrepreneurs. It aims to answer the question of whether differences across economic environments may be reflected in...

Economists would have formulated several aspects of the health care reform debate differently than policy entrepreneurs did. Economists would have questioned whether health care costs must be contained and whether either competition or global budgets were a "magic bullet" for doing so. They also would have emphasized the distortive costs of subsidies and taxes necessary to reach universal cover...