WOMEN ENTREPRENEURIAL SUCCESS IN PAKISTAN: EXAMINING THE ROLE OF FINANCIAL ACCESS, INSTITUTIONAL AND SOCIAL SUPPORT WITH SELF-EFFICACY MEDIATION AND DIGITAL LITERACY MODERATION EVIDENCE FROM SIALKOT

Abstract

In developing economies, women entrepreneurship has become an important source of an inclusive economic growth but in Pakistan, structural constraints are compounding factors limiting the power of women in entrepreneurship. The research paper is an investigation of Women Entrepreneurial Success (WES) determinants in Sialkot, Pakistan with Access to Finance (AF) as its independent variables, Government Support (GS) as its mediating variable, and Digital Literacy (DL) as its moderating variable. The quantitative cross-sectional design is based on the theory of the Resource-Based View (RBV) and Social Feminist Theory and involved the use of 300 women entrepreneurs who were surveyed using a structured questionnaire. The main analytical method was partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM). Findings affirm that AF, GS and SS are all significant predictors of ESE which also fully mediate their associations with WES. The digital literacy plays a significant moderating role in the ESE-WES relationship, enhancing the outcomes of entrepreneurs in a combination of self-efficacy and digital capability. Each of the eleven hypotheses was approved. The research plays a role in the emerging literature on gendered entrepreneurship in South Asia by developing a moderated mediation model that connects financial, institutional, and social endowments to the success of entrepreneurship by the psychological process of self-efficacy