Entrepreneurship: a philosophy for sustainable development and poverty reduction

The author arrived in Brazil in the late 70’s and found extreme poverty in the shantytowns and one of the worst income distribution between the rich and the poor in the world. Invited to give classes at the FGV, he started in 1980 teaching entrepreneurship with the objective of incentivizing the students to become entrepreneurs and so promote economic growth to reduce poverty and income inequality. Returning to the country in 2008 the author makes a reflexion on the reasons why these objectives where not reached in spite of the entrepreneurial activity in Latin America is greater than in the US. The explanation lies in the motivation of the entrepreneurial activity. The opportunity entrepreneurship has a significantly greater impact on the economic growth of a country than the necessity entrepreneurship. Generally the economic growth of a low income country is inversely proportional to its necessity entrepreneurial activity and the economic growth of a high income country is directly proportional to its opportunity entrepreneurial activity. Brazil and Colombia have only 55% of their entrepreneurial activity motivated by opportunity with contrasts with the 80% in the US, according to the Global Entrepreneurship Monitor (GEM) research. The solution proposed by the author is that the technical schools and universities should restructure their entrepreneurship courses that have not met their objectives of economic growth and incentivize opportunity entrepreneurship oriented toward sustainable development and poverty reduction and necessity entrepreneurship to eliminate extreme poverty.