Trade and Development Board, 67th executive session

The Least Developed Countries Report 2018: Entrepreneurship for Structural Transformation - Beyond Business as Usual will be presented to the Trade and Development Board.

The report argues that for least developed countries to progress towards achieving the Sustainable Development Goals, they need to transform the structure of their economy.

This requires, in turn, dynamic entrepreneurship that introduces innovations in spheres like production, consumption, transport and administration.

The most common form of entrepreneurship is that practiced by firms, and the enterprises most conducive to structural transformation are those with high impact and high growth. However, the entrepreneurial landscape in the least developed countries is dominated by self-employment and predominantly informal microenterprises and small enterprises, with limited chances of survival and growth and little propensity to innovate.

For entrepreneurship to be the driving force towards structural transformation, policies need to target the most transformational firms that have a high potential to overcome structural deficiencies in least developed country economies and achieve increases in productivity, while creating jobs and surviving in the contemporary global market.

Entrepreneurship of this kind typically requires varied and proactive policy support that targets different stages in a firm's development trajectory.