Does Entrepreneurship Promote Economic Growth in Africa?

Abstract There seems to be a cloud of scepticism hanging over the value of entrepreneurship to the growth processes of developing economies. This haze of scepticism is fuelled by the reverberating mantra by a section of the extant literature that replicative entrepreneurship (entrepreneurship which is generally considered not to be growth‐supporting) is pervasive in developing economies including Africa. We take motivation from this postulation to investigate whether entrepreneurship is of any relevance to the growth processes of 12 African countries. The results show that entrepreneurship positively explains the variations in the growth of the study countries. It is, thus, reasonable to contend that entrepreneurship in developing economies including Africa even if replicative is instrumental to economic growth.