It is with a great pleasure that I inaugurate the first Special Section hosted in the Eurasian Business Review.

I also take the opportunity to report that—in the last two years of activity under Springer cover—we have considered more than 250 submissions and published 37 articles, resulting in a rejection rate of approximately 85%. In the same period, we have also managed to be indexed in Web of Science and this has significantly increased the visibility and the scientific reputation of EABR.

The special section included in this issue is titled “Entrepreneurship and young firm growth in Developing Countries” and it has been edited by the Guest Editor Micheline Goedhuys, who was in charge of the referee process and the final selection of the included articles.

Indeed, new firm formation and young firm growth play a crucial role in increasing competition, inducing innovation and fostering the emergence of new sectors. However, the relationship between the rate of new firm creation and firm growth on the one hand and economic development on the other hand is heterogeneous across countries: in particular, many Developing Countries (DCs) have large numbers of ‘defensive and necessity’ entrepreneurs, who start a new business not because of market opportunities and innovative ideas, but because they need an income to survive. Moreover, DCs are characterized by important market failures and institutional constraints which may hamper innovative entrepreneurial start-ups and the growth of newborn firms.

Such heterogeneity can be better understood when shifting the focus to the micro foundations of entrepreneurship and firm growth. In this framework, this special section is addressed to shed some light on these issues through evidence-based studies using microdata from DCs.

In more detail, the opening article by Van der Zwan et al. (2016)—although not dealing exclusively with the DCs—moves exactly from the distinction between opportunity and necessity entrepreneurship discussed above and shows that the probability of being an opportunity versus a necessity business owner is higher for male, younger, wealthier, proactive, and optimistic business owners.

Using microdata from Egypt and Tunisia, the contribution by Goedhuys et al. (2016) shows that corruption has a direct negative effect on the likelihood that a firm is an innovator, but a positive effect when the degree of corruption is interacted with institutional obstacles. Therefore, corruption per se is adverse to entrepreneurial opportunities and innovative ideas but can be seen as a way to bypass the bureaucratic obstacles which are so common in the DCs.

The third article of the special section—by Arouri et al. (2016)—studies the impact of small firms’ entry and exit dynamics on net job creation in Tunisia during the period 2000–2013, showing that small firms in Tunisia have a strong social impact in the form of new job creation, but a weak economic impact in terms of wealth creation. Indeed, this unsatisfactory economic performance can be due to the fact that Tunisian SMEs are driven mostly by necessity and unskilled entrepreneurs.

Olivari (2016) is instead devoted to investigate the possible link between entrepreneurial traits and firm’s innovation, using a representative firm-level survey from Chile. In particular, her microeconometric analysis shows that intrinsically motivated and highly educated entrepreneurs turn out to be more innovative. Furthermore, different entrepreneurial profiles are related to different innovation propensities.

Finally, Ferragina et al. (2016), using Moroccan firm-level data, investigates the relationship between two proxies of financial constraints and firm’s productivity growth. The authors show that each of the two financial constraint proxies has a significant and negative impact on Moroccan SMEs but not on their larger counterparts.

I think that the selected articles included in this special section offer a multi-faceted view of the circumstances entrepreneurs and SMEs face in the DCs and of the possible ways to foster opportunity-driven and innovative entrepreneurship in those countries. I really hope our readers will enjoy reading them.