Alumni

A large proportion of workers in low and middle-income countries are business owners. A significant share of them lives in vulnerability and poverty in spite of all the efforts made by societies around the world to tackle these issues. Entrepreneurship support policies have established as one of the policy instruments available to governments to enable the poor to absorb the benefits of economic growth. There are still several unanswered questions around the policy process and about the entrepreneurs themselves that need to be answered to better inform governments and policymakers.

This thesis explores several aspects of the microenterprise sector and its contribution to inclusive social development in Colombia. It widens the knowledge about entrepreneurs and the policies designed to support them. It presents an in-depth picture of entrepreneurs in Cartagena, Colombia, and studies the effects of the interaction of different policies on this group. The results inform a broad range of policy issues relevant to development, policymaking, and research communities in Colombia, Latin-America and other low- and middle-income economies.

	Selected publications by Omar Rodriguez
Articles (journal, professional, popular)
Rodriguez, Omar, 2015, `Entrepreneurship and its analysis in Colombia: A contextualized literature review, Cuadernos de Economía, 34, More information
Book chapters
Pineda, Javier & Omar Rodriguez, 2021, Trabajadoras del cuidado en la salud: Crecimiento sin reconocimiento, in: Laura Porra-Santanilla Natalia Ramírez-Bustamante (eds), Mucho camello, poco empleo. Por qué el trabajo de las mujeres en Colombia es escaso, devalorado y mal remunerado, Universidad de los Andes, Bogotá
UNU-MERIT Working Papers
Rodriguez, Omar, 2022, The productive role of social policy, UNU-MERIT Working Paper 2022-010
Rodriguez, Omar, 2021, How different are necessity and opportunity firms? Evidence from a quantile analysis of the Colombian microenterprise sector, UNU-MERIT Working Paper 2021-019
Rodriguez, Omar, 2021, Does entrepreneurship increase the chances of the poor?, UNU-MERIT Working Paper 2021-018
External working papers
Diaz, Yadira, Liliana Narváez, Omar Rodriguez, Mónica Cortés & Juan S. Silva, 2020, Evaluating three UNDP entrepreneurship programmes for the economic inclusion of the poor in Colombia, UNDP Working Paper, More information
Theses
Rodriguez, Omar, 2020, Essays on Entrepreneurship in Colombia, PhD dissertation Maastricht University / United Nations University
Briefs
Tirivayi, Nyasha, Omar Rodriguez, Qiang Ma & Thais Juvenal, 2017, Social Protection for Forest Dependent Communities, This policy brief was developed as a collaboration between FAO and UNU-MERIT, More information