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The purpose of this paper is to establish the relationship between foreign participation in enterprises in Africa, their internationalization intensity and the associated moderating conditions.

The study utilized data from the World Bank enterprise surveys in 46 African countries across seven years. The hypothesized relationships are estimated using the Heckman two-stage pooled cross-sectional model to correct for selection bias.

The findings show that foreign participation in enterprises has a positive effect on internationalization intensity in Africa. While we observe this positive effect, we also found that there is a lot of heterogeneity that accompanies this effect based on enterprise size, financial performance and local market competition.

The study contributes to the internationalization literature by showing that foreign participation in local enterprises can have a positive effect on the internationalization propensities of these enterprises. It also shows that the main effect is heterogeneous as it is moderated by other enterprise and environmental factors.

Enterprises should recognize the positive effect that foreign participation in them can have on internationalization intensity. Managers of African enterprises need to look beyond the investments into enterprises that foreign owners offer and take advantage of their foreign market knowledge and legitimacy. Discrimination in local markets could be considered as a push factor to internationalize.

While the study is not the first to explore the relationship between foreign ownership and internationalizing behavior, it is one of the earliest to show that the relationship is heterogeneous, and it provides some key moderators.

The study aims to determine the resource access mechanism in inter-firm networks that aids SME survival in Ghana.

The authors collect census data on a poultry cluster in Ghana and construct a directed network. The network is used to extract direct and indirect ties both incoming and outgoing, as well as estimate the structural holes of the actors. These variables are used to estimate for survival of SMEs after a one-year period using a binary logit model.

The study finds that out-indirect ties and structural hole have a significant influence on SME survival. This works through the global influence and the vision advantage that these positions and ties offer the SMEs.

The study offers SMEs a choice of whom to collaborate with for information (resources) in the form of outgoing and incoming ties at both the global and local level.

Despite the blossoming nature of social media marketing, the nuances and implications among small- and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) appear to be under-researched in literature. The purpose of this paper is to progress knowledge and offer extended understanding of the motivations and performance benefits of social media accrued by SMEs with an empirical study from an emerging economy.

Based on past research, the study hypothesizes that interactivity, compatibility and cost effectiveness are motivations germane to social media usage, which consequently offer performance benefits. Data from 210 SMEs (having Facebook and/or Twitter accounts) are employed to investigate the proposed conceptual model using structural equation modeling with sub-group analysis.

Finding from this study demonstrate that the interdependencies of social media motivations, as well as effects of social media usage are positive but erratic across product-based and service-based SMEs. Moreover, SMEs who offer physical products are more likely to employ social media based on cost-effective motives while service SMEs are more likely to consider interactivity as a key motivation. Additionally, findings from the study data suggest that in a tale of two sites, Facebook proved to edge Twitter in terms of engendering performance benefits among SME users.

The findings provide evidence to issues of potential research and managerial interest, offering insightful implications to the academic and practitioner communities. Evidently, irrespective of some usage bottlenecks, SMEs in emerging markets appears to be reaping enhanced social media benefits by deploying their marketing campaigns via multiple platforms.

The purpose of this study was to understand the usefulness of financial institution class ties in small commercial poultry farms’ (SCPFs’) survival in Ghana.

The study uses data from a network survey with associated attribute data on poultry small- and medium-sized enterprises. The data were collected in two waves between January 2014 and March 2015. Survival is estimated using a lagged probit model.

It was found that the survival rate of SCPFs is influenced by ties to universal banks and cooperative credit unions that have a positive effect while those with ties to savings and loans companies have a reduced survival probability.

The findings of the study make a significant contribution to the agricultural enterprise financing literature showing the relevance of the different financial institution types in the continued survival of agricultural SCPFs.

Many nations now engage in economic promotion of their countries in foreign countries. One major aspect of this activity is export promotions. This paper aims to understand the relationship between export promotional activity participation and export performance by Ghanaian manufacturing firms.

The list of manufacturing exporters was obtained from the Ghana Export Promotion Authority, and the convenience and snowballing approach was used to reach and administer research instrument. The relationship between export promotion and performance was estimated using a multiple regression.

The results of this study indicate that exporters should implement specific export promotion programmes if they want to enhance export performance and become successful. The findings of this study show that the programmes that have a strong positive relationship with export performance are trade fairs, foreign offices and tax and financial incentives.

The results of this study contribute to the international entrepreneurship literature in several ways. First, findings from this study contribute to the limited literature on exports in developing countries such as Ghana. Again, the study framework provides assistance to assess and monitor emerging trends in export promotion strategies. Also, export promotion, as a whole, provides a framework in which firms formulate strategies, allocates resources and seeks opportunities in a coordinated way. Finally, in the international marketplace, firms need to maintain their competitive edge, and it is important to operate efficiently and effectively using an appropriate export promotional strategy.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the relationship between past entrepreneurial failure and future entrepreneurial intentions. It also considers the moderating role of past entrepreneurial failure on the relationship between attitude, subjective norms and perceived behavioural control (PBC) and entrepreneurial intentions.

Data from the Ghana Global Entrepreneurship Monitor Adult Population Survey (2013) are used to test the hypotheses developed after an extensive literature review. The empirical specification was estimated with a probit of standard form and marginal derivatives estimated for the purposes of interpretation.

The mean future entrepreneurial intent is 63.2 per cent of the sample with 75 per cent having failed in the past and 60 per cent never failed before. Also, only 20.9 per cent of the interviewed entrepreneurs have failed at a past entrepreneurial activity. Past entrepreneurial failure has a positive effect on future entrepreneurial intentions. The interaction between attitude and failure yields a positive effect on future entrepreneurial intentions. The same effects can be reported for the interactions between subjective norms and failure as well as PBC and failure.

In this study, the authors are able to show that the mean moderational effects are important but they can be deceptive. Rather, a decomposition helps the authors to disaggregate these effects to better understand the underlying mechanisms.

The purpose of this paper is to understand the relationship between microfinance participation and entrepreneurial behaviour of Ghanaian families as well as the moderating role of the family head’s gender. It is argued from a resource-based theory perspective that microfinance is a financial resource that removes credit constraints to entrepreneurial behaviour of families. However, gender of the family head creates heterogeneity in this relationship in line with the gender theory.

In order to test these claims, cross-sectional data from 2,727 families on microfinance participation and household characteristics in Ghana are utilised.

The study finds that microfinance participation has a positive and significant relationship with a family’s decision to own an enterprise. Also, the study finds that female-headed families are better utilizers of microfinancial resources for entrepreneurial purposes compared to their male counterparts. This difference is a pure gender effect.

This finding is in contrast to the dominant stream of gender-based entrepreneurship research that suggests that women are subordinate to men and need to be helped to become “honorary men”. From a policy standpoint, solutions aimed at reversing discrimination against women in economic markets must consider women within their own right. The study makes a contribution to the literature by showing empirically the source of heterogeneity in entrepreneurial returns to microfinance participation by families.

The purpose of this paper is to integrate the theory of planned behavior (TBP) and the technology acceptance model (TAM) in social marketing to predict and explain technology adoption (gym equipment use) in physical activity (PA) behavior among Ghanaian youth.

A quantitative approach was adopted for this study. The empirical data for this paper were drawn from 314 youth who are gym equipment users. The hypothesized relationships were analyzed using structural equation modeling.

This study found that the salient beliefs, namely, attitude, subjective norm and behavioral control toward gym equipment use, do not sufficiently explain PA adoption. However, a better result emerges when these salient beliefs are combined with perceived usefulness (PU) and ease of use (TAM).

This paper provides evidence for issues of potential research, policy and managerial interest. The study findings showed that PA adoption, not PEOU, was directly impacted by PU. Thus, policymakers and implementers of social marketing intervention programs should promote the positive attitude toward gym equipment technology use and the perceptions of usefulness (improve cardiorespiratory fitness, feeling healthy and building muscle strength) of using gym equipment technology instead of ease of use to increase PA technology adoption behavior.

Considering the uniqueness of this current study in the Ghanaian context, to the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first to integrate two influential theories, namely, the TPB and TAM, to examine the effects of the TPB and TAM variables on the adoption of technology (gym equipment use) in PA among the youth.

The purpose of this paper is to assess the moderation effect of organizational leadership on the relationship between service firm’s innovation strategy and organizational development. The study argues that in Ghana where power distance is high, organizational leadership provides the needed impetus for strategies such as innovation to achieve enhanced firm performance.

Data were collected from different service firms across Ghana for this study. A confirmatory factor analysis was used for construct reliability and validity checks. Robust regression estimations were then performed to test the hypothesized relationships.

The results show that both product innovation as strategy and organizational leadership are positively related to organizational development (i.e. financial and non-financial performance). It was also found that organizational leadership does not only serve as a predictor of strategy formulation but provides the necessary strategic fit between a firm’s strategy and business environment to achieve organizational development.

This study has shown that in high-power distance cultures, firms that are able to align their leadership orientation with their institutional environment are able to create a better fit between their strategic orientation and business environment in order to enhance organizational development.