Abstract
Prior research has examined and classified various types of barriers to entrepreneurship (Gould and Parzen, 1990; Maykut & Morehouse, 1994; Pissarides, 1999; Kouriloff, 2000; Bartlett, 2001; Pissarides, Singer, & Svenjar, 2003; Hatala, 2005; Bath, Yago, & Zeidman, 2006; Bartlett & Bukvic, 2011; Gill, Biger, & Nagpal, 2011; Jain & Ali, 2014; Yukhanaev et al., 2015; Effah, 2016). However, the existing typologies do not consider that barriers to entrepreneurship may interact and reinforce one another. In this paper, we propose that four of such negative synergies exist undermining the development of entrepreneurship in transition economies. We describe them as bureaucratic-corruptive, economic-operational, cultural-cognitive, and social-moral negative synergies. We test and advance our model by analyzing Kazakhstan experts' opinions on obstacles to entrepreneurship. These experts took part in the National Expert Survey (NES) as part of the General Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) study in 2015 and 2016. In addition, we advance our model by examining the interviews we recently conducted with twenty Russian entrepreneurs.