| Micro and small enterprises (MSEs) predominate across most sectors in developing countries, and especially agriculture and food. Such enterprises play a key role in the socio-economic development process, through impacts on household income, employment, gender empowerment and economic growth. At the same time, however, studies indicate that low growth rates, stagnation and firm exit plague the MSE sector, suggesting the need to transform the sector in order to contribute meaningfully to economic development. Numerous factors have been posited to explain the weak performance of MSEs, including problems accessing credit and weak managerial ability.;While highlighting the role of specific factors on enterprise performance, the extant literature has important limitations. First, little attention, however, has been given to the entrepreneurial characteristics of micro and small entrepreneurs. Second, despite its multidimensional nature, most previous studies examine enterprise performance only in terms of economic measures, particularly profit and growth in sales and/or employment. Third, the literature largely ignores the strategic posture of MSEs, and the contributions from the resource bundle employed in MSE operations are generally not accounted for in explaining performance. Three independent but related essays comprising this thesis address these gaps. A survey is undertaken of 600 MSEs across six districts of Ghana.;The first paper focuses on the entrepreneurial alertness (EA) of MSE operators in Ghana's agribusiness sector. A relatively small set of personal and acquired attributes and environmental factors explain variations in the level of EA, notably personal agency beliefs and specifically locus of control, level of education, sub-sector, location and ethnicity. Contrary to expectations, there is no significant variation across gender. The second paper employs three different measures of enterprise performance, namely employment, profitability and contribution to household income, within a resource-based analytic framework to examine the influence of enterprise resources and environmental factors on performance. Firm-level resources are found to be a key determinant of enterprise performance, while measures of entrepreneurial ability have limited impact. The findings suggest that MSE development strategies, and in turn efforts towards poverty alleviation, should focus on augmenting the access to enterprises strategic resources.;The third paper employs the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm to explore the casual relationships among enterprise resources, entrepreneurial orientation and MSE performance using structural equations modelling which integrates through causal relations the influence of environmental factors, enterprise resources, and entrepreneurial resources on entrepreneurial orientation and MSE performance in a configurational manner. The concept of micro-entrepreneurial orientation (MEO) is introduced as a factor that is indigenous to MSEs in developing countries. The dimensions of MEO are found to have a distinct influence on the resource --- performance relation. This suggests that the concept of MEO is indeed important to our understanding of MSE performance. |
