ABSTRACT

This chapter demonstrates an understanding of the entrepreneurship landscape in Latin American economies. Over half of all workers in Latin America are employed in the informal economy. According to Worldpay's 2017 Global Payments Report, the Latin American e-commerce was US$59 billion in 2017, which will increase to US$118 billion in 2021. According to the FinTech startup accelerator, Finnovista Mexico accounts for more than a third of FinTech companies in Latin America that target at the underbanked or unbanked populations. A final observation about gender and entrepreneurship in the region is that women are more likely to be employed than men in the informal sector. There is a severe shortage of entrepreneurship-related skills in Latin America. Only a small proportion of Latin American college students go into science or engineering. According to the World Bank, in 2015, Chile had 455 researchers in R&D per million inhabitants compared to 7,087 in South Korea.