ALLEVIATING POVERTY THROUGH ENTREPRENEURSHIP: HOMO ENTREPRENEUR, ENTREPRENEURIAL CULTURE, AND STATE

Abstract

Creating economic well-being considers entrepreneurship as a basic factor. Improving entrepreneurship improves economic well-being/wealth at all levels of aggregation: individual, family, social community, state, and world civilization. Improving entrepreneurship means applying knowledge and understanding its causal factors. It is essentially a psychological, socio-cultural, and political-economic phenomenon. As a psychological/mental phenomenon, it can be recognized in individual conative (value), emotional-motivational, intellectual, and behavioral characteristics of people who start businesses (characteristics of enterprising persons/homo entrepreneur). As a social/cultural phenomenon, entrepreneurship recognizes social attitudes and behavior (culture), manifested as a mentality as a key success ingredient. As a political-economic phenomenon, it recognizes the importance of the political-economic situation, that is, in the actual resource support of state institutions, the absence of obstacles/disincentives for entrepreneurs, and in economic policies, practices, and habits that stimulate entrepreneurial ventures and economic growth. The results of the discussion about the individual, socio-cultural, and political-economic characteristics necessary for an entrepreneurial (creative) society have several outcomes.   In the context of poverty alleviation, there is indicated the necessity of cultivating/internalizing: a) specific characteristics of entrepreneurs that make up an entrepreneurial person/homo entrepreneur, b) specific entrepreneurial values - cultural characteristics that form an entrepreneurial culture/mentality, and c) specific political-economic entrepreneurship prone characteristics/behavior of the state (state institutions) that form an entrepreneurial state. In such a context, management solutions for entrepreneurial/economic development improvement should suggest an integral strategy for poverty alleviation. Such a strategy should have different levels of aggregation from the individual to the global civilization of the human species.