"The Guidelines for the Promotion of Inclusive Business in ASEAN document provides an outline on how inclusive businesses can be supported at the national level, and what institutional setup is required to do so. The guidelines also provide recommendations on how ASEAN policy makers could collectively promote inclusive business at the regional level. We hope that this document would serve as a useful reference document for ASEAN policy makers in formulating national and regional strategies towards achieving a resilient, inclusive, people-oriented and people-centered ASEAN."

"Although early-stage finance is critical to the growth of most ventures, it is even more important for social ventures as they face the challenges of balancing their social and commercial objectives. Drawing on institutional logics and signaling theory, this study uses a panel data set of 3,401 nascent social ventures to investigate the important role philanthropic grant funding plays in the organizational and financial development of social ventures. We find mixed results, with positive effects on employment and subsequent access to debt finance, but no effects on revenues and access to equity. Our findings connect these theories by suggesting philanthropic grants provide social ventures with flexibility to invest in human capital without pushing them to pursue short-term financial objectives, and that receiving a philanthropic grant provides a signal that is interpreted differently by debt and equity financiers. These findings are especially relevant as funders increasingly use grants to support social entrepreneurship."

"Why is high-growth entrepreneurship scarce in developing countries? Does this scarcity reflect firm capabilities constraints? We explore these questions using as a laboratory an accelerator in Colombia that selects participants using scores from randomly assigned judges and offers them training, advice, and visibility but no cash. Exploiting exogenous differences in judges' scoring generosity, we show that alleviating constraints to firm capabilities unlocks innovative entrepreneurs' potential but does not transform subpar ideas into high-growth firms. The results demonstrate that some high-potential entrepreneurs in developing economies face firm capabilities constraints and accelerators can help identify these entrepreneurs and boost their growth."

"Fifty economies participated in the GEM 2019 Adult Population Survey (APS), Over 150,000 individuals participated in extended interviews as part of the GEM research in 2019. This is the solid evidence base for the GEM findings that are presented in this report and summarized here. Despite this extensive GEM evidence base, there are at least as many questions as answers as a result of this year’s analysis. As usual, GEM has a plethora of insights and some of the newest and key findings are listed below. The report also contains a detailed entrepreneurial profile of each participating economy, accompanied by a policy roadmap and full data tables showing the value of each GEM entrepreneurial variable in each economy."

"This report, "Growing Impact" follows IFC’s first assessment of the global market for impact investing and investor practices, "Creating Impact", published in April 2019. In this new report we explore more deeply the size and makeup of the impact investing market and analyze the practices of impact investors, drawing on data from a survey of the signatories to the Operating Principles and a set of 32 signatory case studies. The case studies illustrate how we are creating a powerful market force by embracing a shared vision and approach."

"The global drive to provide universal access to sustainable and modern energy by 2030 is creating numerous opportunities for energy users and suppliers. However, men and women do not benefit equally from these opportunities. As users, they have different energy needs linked to their different gender roles. Gender blindness in the sector has led to women's needs often being ignored. As suppliers, the energy sector has traditionally been male dominated. Despite stark gender differences in the energy sector, there has been a lack of evidence to inform more equitable policymaking. This issue of the IDS Bulletin aims to fill some of these evidence gaps through five original papers, part of ENERGIA's Gender and Energy Research Programme. The issue pays particular attention to women's involvement in the supply chain as energy entrepreneurs, an emerging area of research in the gender and energy space."

"This issue brief is a part of the series formulated by Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs’ (ANDE) India chapter. It aims to contextualize the findings and strategy outlined in ANDE’s global gender issue brief, for India, and to create a knowledge base connecting our urgent issues and the Small and Growing Business (SGB) sector at a regional level. This brief is a starting point for conversations on gender equality and is meant to help shape ANDE India’s strategy for the region."

"We seek to examine founder gender preferences in the context of equity crowdfunding, which represents a direct counterpart to traditional equity financing and which is a "higher-stakes" context than rewards-based crowdfunding. More specifically, we explore whether founder gender preferences, if they exist, vary based on the gender and the experience of the investor. Through a randomized field experiment, we find that inexperienced female investors are significantly more interested (138%) in ventures with female founders than those with male founders; however, we do not observe founder gender preferences among experienced female investors. For male investors, we do not observe differences in interest in investing based on founder gender or investor experience. We thus confirm that the gender gaps observed in traditional equity funding do not apply to equity crowdfunding. Further, we theorize that the mechanisms proposed in previous research in low-stakes crowdfunding decision contexts, such as the use of founder gender as a heuristic and participation in activism homophily, that drive female investors to prefer female founders may not apply to experienced investors in higher-stakes equity crowdfunding. The results from a follow-up survey of the study participants provide support for our theoretical arguments."

"We study gender and race in high-impact entrepreneurship using a tightly controlled randomized field experiment. We sent out 80,000 pitch emails introducing promising but fictitious start-ups to 28,000 venture capitalists and angels. Each email was sent by a fictitious entrepreneur with randomly assigned gender and race. Female entrepreneurs received 9% more interested replies than males pitching identical projects and Asians received 6% more than Whites. Our results suggest that investors do not discriminate against female or Asian entrepreneurs when evaluating unsolicited pitch emails and that future research on investor biases should focus on networks and in-person interactions."

"Small and medium-sized enterprises make up a large part of Sri Lanka's economy, with over one million SMEs accounting for approximately 75 percent of all businesses. These are found in all sectors of the economy and are estimated to contribute about 45 percent of total employment in Sri Lanka. Women's ownership of formal small and medium-sized enterprises is low, at around 25 percent of all SMEs, and most women business-owners struggle to transition away from informal micro-scale businesses, in part due to limited access to finance and lower business capacity of women entrepreneurs. This report presents a snapshot of the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on small and medium-sized enterprises (SME) across Sri Lanka, with a focus on the different impacts experienced by women-owned and managed businesses (WSME), as compared to those owned by men (MSME) and those owned jointly by a woman and a man (JSME)."