ENTREPRENEURSHIP AS ECONOMIC RESILIENCE IN CRISIS ECONOMIES: Lebanon as a Case Study in Post-Collapse Venture Formation
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Lebanon's economic collapse between 2019 and 2022, classified by the World Bank as one of the most severe sovereign financial crises since the mid-nineteenth century, produced conditions of extreme institutional fragility: hyperinflation, banking system paralysis, and mass capital flight. Paradoxically, this period of systemic failure coincided with a marked acceleration in entrepreneurial activity, as individuals stripped of formal employment and banking access turned to micro-enterprise, digital commerce, and diaspora-financed ventures as primary mechanisms of economic survival. This paper investigates the relationship between crisis severity and entrepreneurial activity in Lebanon, arguing that entrepreneurship functions not merely as an economic behavior but as a fundamental mechanism of collective and individual resilience in the face of institutional collapse. Employing a mixed-methods design, integrating a quantitative cross-sectional survey of 320 entrepreneurs across five Lebanese governorates with a phenomenological qualitative inquiry comprising 40 in-depth interviews, the study finds that necessity-driven entrepreneurship accounted for 61.4% of new ventures post-2019, that 73.8% of entrepreneurs relied on diaspora remittances as their primary capitalization source, and that female-led enterprises demonstrated significantly higher survival rates than male-led counterparts (68.2% vs. 51.7%; χ² = 9.34, p = .002). Three qualitative themes emerge: adaptive innovation, community-anchored resilience through religious and civil society networks, and psychological ambivalence consistent with Shepherd's (2019) dual-process model. The findings advance crisis entrepreneurship theory by proposing a transnational resilience framework, establishing gender as a moderating variable in crisis entrepreneurial outcomes, and theorizing religious institutional networks as entrepreneurial infrastructure. Implications for policymakers, international development institutions, and the Lebanese diaspora are discussed.
Keywords
Crisis Entrepreneurship, Diaspora Capital, Economic Resilience, Gender, Institutional Void, Lebanon, Mena, Necessity Entrepreneurship