Purpose: This paper presents a university service-learning program as an innovative model of assistance to deliver business development services to Mexican microenterprises.Design/methodology/approach: The main objectives were to deliver business development services in situ at no cost to unprivileged enterprises, conduct research on microenterprises development and build up a service-learning model of teaching and learning for students in the field of economics and surrounding disciplines. It was implemented by the Autonomous University of Baja California. It plays an important role in providing real cases and concepts on business, economics, markets and fiscal regulations. The service-learning approach prepare to students to be generous, selfless, problem solvers and job creators.Findings: The experience demonstrates that program can play a key role, both in supporting disadvantaged microenterprises and in providing meaningful learning experiences to students. The program has shown its ability to take advantage of institutional, human and financial resources already released to higher educations institutions (HEI) and government, to support social business extensively, as to make less critical the use of resources in the form of subsidies.Originality/value: This program was employed by the Mexican State Government of Baja California as a compensatory public policy against the unemployment burden created by the global crisis between 2009 and 2013. About ten thousand individuals pushed to necessity-driven entrepreneurship or informal social enterprises were assisted, trained and formalized in the tax authority by 700 university senior students.

Este documento se enmarca en los modelos pedagógicos de investigación-acción y aprendizaje-servicio, a través de la operación de un programa de asistencia a negocios sociales. Se comparte la operación de un programa de investigación, asistencia y enseñanza a empresas, en donde estudiantes de último grado de licenciatura de la Universidad Autónoma de Baja California, México, actúan como consultores de micronegocios emprendidos en zonas de alta marginación, asistiéndolos en temas de desarrollo empresarial y personal. De esta forma, de 1999 a 2019, han participado más de 1 720 estudiantes en 12 790 negocios sociales, impactando en su fortalecimiento como fuente de ingresos de familias en condiciones de pobreza. Los hallazgos arrojan resultados deseables en los mecanismos de aprendizaje para estudiantes, a través de experiencias reales con empresas en contextos de alta marginación, mejorando su sentido solidario, emprendedor y de colaboración.

El objetivo del artículo fue analizar la resiliencia del emprendimiento mexicano ante contextos de las crisis económicas 2020 y 2008. Se aplicó la técnica de descomposición de ciclo y tendencia de Hodrick-Prescott sobre el producto interno bruto, con el fin de determinar el periodo de caída y recuperación de la actividad económica. Además, se calcularon indicadores de recuperación y resistencia sobre el emprendimiento para determinar el grado de resiliencia. Los resultados muestran que el emprendimiento fue resiliente en aproximadamente el 16% de las entidades mexicanas ante la crisis sanitaria, caracterizadas por una importante resistencia y recuperación, mientras que en la crisis subprime fue del 25%.

The dynamism of entrepreneurship represents perhaps the most basic element for market economies, offering different productive and social benefits, whose scope depends on the conditions in how it is generated. Therefore, this research analyzes the relationship between entrepreneurial activity and some of the public behaviors in Mexico, where government access and openness, the perception of insecurity and the quality of public services represent the institutional variables of this study. Through the cross-sectional method, the findings suggest that the quality of public services, government access and openness are significant institutional elements at the time of starting a business, while the perception of insecurity is not a statistically significant factor, what offers guidelines for its pertinent analysis.

Social Enterprise (SE) is an increasingly important sector for generating employment and distributing wealth in market structures. The social business type two (SB2)—a very specific type of SE—is a category that has challenged orthodox theoretical elements in its main assumptions and behavior in the markets. SB2 is mainly classified within the category of microenterprises because they have a very small number of employees. A new official business classification is important to differentiate enterprises not only by size, but also by type of behavior. There is a new indicator that compares the profit levels of microenterprises with the poverty line as a representative tool to classify Mexican microenterprises into profit seekers and SB2. When these outcomes are contrasted with a discrete choice model under the logistic functional form, the probabilities that this indicator classifies a microenterprise with entrepreneurship by necessity, installed capacity maximization and no profit seeking as SB2 is 80% for microenterprises up to ten workers, and goes up to 92% for microenterprises with one person. With such a new classification, better policies could be promoted to support SB2, and help address both the lack of opportunities from the market economy and poverty menace.

This paper aims to calculate and analyze the human capital returns of micro-enterprises on Mexico’s northern border by examining the education levels of the micro-entrepreneurs in charge of the production unit. Analyzing data from the National Survey of Occupation and Employment from 2010 to 2019, we estimated econometric cross-section models based on Mincer equations. The results suggest that elementary education is not sufficient to achieve high monetary income in micro-enterprises, even its rates are negative, generating losses systematically. The turning point starts in high school, where positive rates are beginning to be observed. However, it highlights that undergraduate and postgraduate education doubles their positive returns, although the number of business owners with this education level is lower.