Smaller companies are abundant in the business realm and outnumber large companies by a wide margin. To maintain a competitive edge against other businesses, companies must ensure the most effective strategies and procedures are in place. This is particularly critical in smaller business environments that have fewer resources. Start-Ups and SMEs: Concepts, Methodologies, Tools, and Applications is a vital reference source that examines the strategies and concepts that will assist small and medium-sized enterprises to achieve competitiveness. It also explores the latest advances and developments for creating a system of shared values and beliefs in small business environments. Highlighting a range of topics such as entrepreneurship, innovative behavior, and organizational sustainability, this multi-volume book is ideally designed for entrepreneurs, business managers, executives, managing directors, academicians, business professionals, researchers, and graduate-level students.

This book is the result of five years of research that I carried out as a research fellow at the Faculty of Economics and Econometrics of the University of Amsterdam. The project was initiated in 1986 by Frans van Winden and Roy Thurik. Frans van Winden became interested in self employment through his work concerning government behavior. In the models that he employs, the government is influenced by various social groups, the political strength of which is related to their size. As one of these is the group of self-employed individuals, he became interested in determinants of the size of this group. Roy Thurik was professionally interested in the subject because of his work at the Research Institute for Small and Medium-sized Business in the Netherlands (EIM), an institute that does much research in this area. Together, they wrote a proposal for a research project, for which they received funding from the Dutch Ministry of Economic Affairs . These funds were supplemented by the University of Amsterdam and at a later stage by the Organization for the Advancement of Research in the Economic Discipline (ECOZOEK), that is part of the Netherlands Organization for Scientific Research (NWO). This support is gratefully acknowiedged. The commercial edition of this book was partIy financed by the Centre for Energy Conservation and Environmental Technology (CE), the Center for Research in Experimental Economics and Political Decisionmaking (CREED), and the University of Amsterdam.

As self-employment and entrepreneurship become increasingly important in our modern economies, Simon C. Parker provides a timely, definitive and comprehensive overview of the field. In this book he brings together and assesses the large and disparate literature on these subjects and provides an up-to-date overview of new research findings. Key issues addressed include: the impact of ability, risk, personal characteristics and the macroeconomy on entrepreneurship; issues involved in raising finance for entrepreneurial ventures, with an emphasis on the market failures that can arise as a consequence of asymmetric information; the job creation performance of the self-employed; the growth, innovation and exit behaviour of new ventures and small firms; and the appropriate role for governments interested in promoting self-employment and entrepreneurship. This book will serve as an essential reference guide to researchers, students and teachers of entrepreneurship in economics, business and management and other related disciplines.

This is a scholarly study of trends in self-employment, mainly in the United States, since World War II. Aronson finds that self-employment fell till the mid-1970s but is now rising and currently accounts for about 9 percent of the labor force, and for 20 percent when combined with sole proprietors. Women account for about 28 percent of the self-employed, up from 14 percent in 1965. He examines these trends from a labor market perspective. ISBN 0-87546-175-1: $26.00.

Since the 1970s the long term decline in self-employment has slowed – and even reversed in some countries – and the prospect of ‘being your own boss’ is increasingly topical in the discourse of both the general public and within academia. Traditionally, self-employment has been associated with independent entrepreneurship, but increasingly it has become a form of precarious work. This book utilises evidence-based information to address both the current and future challenges of this trend as the nature of self-employment changes, as well as to demonstrate where, when and why self-employment has emerged as precarious work in Europe.

This book examines the nexus between the entrepreneur, the firm, and the region for drawing a comprehensive picture of entrepreneurship in a developing country context. It emphasizes the role of the spatial location in simultaneously determining the occupational choice at an individual level and the nature of new firm start-ups emerging in a region. In doing so, the author provides a novel approach to examining entrepreneurship in emerging economies. Using large-scale databases from India, the book offers fresh insights for shaping public policy in developing countries that aim to pursue entrepreneurship led growth.