This paper aims to examine how entrepreneurs respond to institutional voids across Asia and Africa. While prior research has documented how entrepreneurs compensate for institutional voids in emerging economies, much of this literature treats institutional voids as relatively homogeneous across contexts. This study adopts a comparative capitalism perspective to explain why similar institutional voids may generate different entrepreneurial responses across regions in Asia and Africa.
The authors conducted a systematic literature review of 69 peer-reviewed studies published between 2000 and 2024 examining entrepreneurship under institutional voids across Asian and African economies. Using thematic analysis with the software NVivo, the authors coded entrepreneurial mechanisms and interpreted them through a comparative capitalism framework that distinguishes between patrimonial, state-permeated and hierarchical market economies.
The findings of this study reveal that institutional voids appear across both regions in similar forms – including capital market gaps, regulatory uncertainty, ecosystem deficiencies and infrastructure constraints – yet entrepreneurial responses vary systematically according to the dominant coordination regime. Across the dataset, three core mechanisms emerge: institutional adaptation, institutional substitution and legitimacy construction. In African patrimonial market economies, entrepreneurs rely primarily on community-centric networks, intermediaries and social legitimacy to substitute for weak formal institutions. In Asian contexts, responses tend to differ across capitalist systems: entrepreneurs in state-permeated economies generally adapt by navigating bureaucratic hierarchies and cultivating political networks; firms in hierarchical market economies often substitute missing institutions through internal organisational coordination; and entrepreneurs in Asian patrimonial systems tend to adopt politically mediated legitimacy strategies.
The study makes three key contributions to the literature. Firstly, it advances institutional voids research by showing that institutional deficiencies are often embedded within broader systems of capitalist coordination rather than representing uniform market failures. Secondly, it introduces a macro-regional, comparative perspective to entrepreneurship research by systematically analysing differences between Asian and African institutional environments. Thirdly, it develops a mechanism-based framework explaining how entrepreneurs navigate institutional voids through institutional adaptation, institutional substitution and legitimacy construction.
