Entrepreneurship Development in the last Decades: A Systematic Review

Abstract

As the world struggles with the effects of the coronal virus pandemic, coupled with the worsening situation of poverty and unemployment, the importance of entrepreneurship development has been brought to limelight. Entrepreneurship development as the term implies, is the funding, infrastructure provision, creation of skills and training acquisition centers, making the training personnel available etc for entrepreneurship to strive. Using the Systematic Quantitative Assessment Technique (SQAT), this study carried out a systematic review od 148 entrepreneurship development journal articles in the last decade i.e. 2012-2021 to provide insight as to the working of entrepreneurship development on employment generation. Besides this primary objective, this review also sought to understand the time distribution, geographical distribution, types and data collection methods of these ED articles. Review of empirical evidence revealed that entrepreneurship development is important for employment generation. The review also revealed that over the last decade 2012-2021, interest in ED has grown from year to year, with most of the research in Africa, Asia and Portugal. Furthermore, most of ED research has been empirical in nature, with surveys being the most used means of data collection. There has been inadequacy of qualitative studies in ED scholarship, and this represents a significant gap which future researchers should endeavor to address