Environmental and psychological challenges facing entrepreneurial development in transitional economies

In the former planned economies, a major result of the economic reform prog rams has been the resurgence of private entrepreneurship. As these countrie s have struggled to make the transition to a market-based economy over the past decade, the environment has played an important structural role in ent repreneurial development. However from a psychological perspective, the env ironmental structural context affects human action through cognitive proces ses such as self-regulation. Thus, we first identify and analyze the effect of the political, economic, legal, and cultural environment on the develop ment of entrepreneurship in transitional economies, mainly using the former Soviet Union and particularly the Republic of Kazakhstan as an example. We then examine the role that social cognitive variables mch as self-efficacy may play in the relationship between this external environment and entrepr eneurial development.