Abstract

Entrepreneurship brings about economic innovation and job formation, and its improvement can well account
for the unemployment crisis. However, many barriers either stop entrepreneurs from entering the market, or lead
their business to failure after entering. These barriers have been sparsely and case dependently reported in the
literature, but, to the best of our knowledge, no studies have been yet designated to investigate the general
barriers to entrepreneurship.

This paper tries to bridge this gap by reviewing the most relevant and available literature to elicit the major
general barriers to entrepreneurship. Eleven general barriers to entrepreneurship are identified and supported by
the related literature. Since these barriers are not independent and unconnected, but interrelated and interactive,
understanding the interactions among them can help decision makers in determining appropriate overcoming
measures. In order to model these interactions this paper utilizes interpretive structural modeling (ISM) which
has shown to be an efficient approach for analyzing systematic interactions among barriers. We distinct barriers
into two groups of inside and outside barriers and with the support of the ISM-based model, we show that inside
barriers are dependent on outside barriers. Corrupted and unsupportive business environment then, shows to be
the major driving barrier to entrepreneurship.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.