Regional disparities in entrepreneurship in Turkey with respect to gender using a regression of pooling cross sections: 2006–2015

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is an important process in regional economic development. However, there is no dedicated research to determinants of entrepreneurship in relation to all regions of Turkey. The main objective of chapter is to find the extent to which the level of entrepreneurial activity varies between regions in Turkey. This chapter also contributes to the field of entrepreneurship studies by presenting, for the first time, the entrepreneurship data of women over the regions of Turkey and by analyzing the regional variations with respect to gender in the early stage of entrepreneurial activity. Our findings support the fact that the entrepreneurial activity in the West Marmara, the Mediterranean, the West Black Sea and the West, Southeast and the Central Anatolia Regions, are no different from the base Region of Istanbul. The general entrepreneurship pursuit in Aegean, the East Marmara, the East Black Sea, the Northeast Anatolia and the Central East Anatolia Regions are found to be about 2% lower compared to the Region of Istanbul, on the average. On the other hand, the likelihood of being an entrepreneur among women is highest in the Aegean Region which is 9.4%. This likelihood is even higher than that in the Region of Istanbul which is 8.1%. Hence, the probability of being a woman entrepreneur ranges from 5.8 to 10.6% in Turkey. When the same probabilities are considered at the age of 45, they are lower and range from 5.4 to 9.7%. Moreover, while the entrepreneurial attitudes, i.e. fear of failure in starting business, and education have a negative effect, the perceptions on start-up opportunities and believed to have knowledge, skill and experience have a positive effect on the probability of being an entrepreneur. The data used in this study were collected by means of the national adult population Survey (APS) from the Global Entrepreneurship monitor (GEM) project conducted in Turkey covering the years of 2006–2015 (except for the year of 2009). The dataset consisting of 56,142 interviews with a representative sample of adults (18–64Â years old) covering 12 regions.