Role of Government in Making Entrepreneurial Ecosystem Conducive in Pakistan: Case of Emerging Businesses

Abstract

Entrepreneurship is strongly linked with prosperity, economic development, and wellbeing of a country. The current study attempted to fill this gap and intended to empirically assess the phenomenon of entrepreneurship in Pakistan as well. This process was carried out by analyzing the local context of Pakistan and the role of government according to the standpoint of entrepreneurs. The current study attempted to determine the entrepreneurial situation as experienced by the entrepreneurs in order to understand as to why the culture of entrepreneurship has not been developed in Pakistan in spite of self-employment arrangements introduced by numerous government regimes. For this purpose, a qualitative research strategy was employed to explore this phenomenon. Moreover, about 65 in-depth semi-structured interviews were conducted based on the experiences of the entrepreneurs with government in their entrepreneurial journey. The majority of the entrepreneurs revealed either a total ignorance or undeniable distrust in the government schemes. The entrepreneurs complained of bureaucratic bottlenecks, delays in responses, corrupt culture, and lack of support by government. The results also showed an indication of ‘informal entrepreneurship’ in Pakistan which connotes that businesses prefer to remain unregistered and non-documented by keeping their financial transactions undeclared in order to escape labor law and tax regulations. This, according to the participants of the current study, is considered fundamental by business owners due to tough and complex regulatory procedures for their new businesses. Moreover, it is also further intensified by the unhelping behavior of the pertinent government institutes and their demand of “illegal gratifications” in lieu of offering any service.

Keywords

• Entrepreneurship
• illegal gratifications
• Pakistan
• role of government
• unhelping behavior