Reasons and Obstacles to Starting a Business: Experience of Students of Lithuanian Higher Education Institutions*

The paper examines entrepreneurship as a measure for youth inclusion in the labor market, as well as causes, benefits and obstacles to starting a business, based on the experiences of students of Lithuanian higher education institutions. Although Lithuania implements a variety of measures intended for promoting student entrepreneurship, students remain in a worse situation in terms of opportunities for entrepreneurship than the remaining society. The purpose of the research is to study the reasons and obstacles for inclusion of the undergraduate students in entrepreneurship. The research of inclusion and participation of students in entrepreneurship revealed that only a small part of them were engaged in business. This is caused by unwillingness to be a hired employee. Students associate engaging in business with personal revenues, which they rate as the most significant benefit, while the main obstacle is the lack of information on starting a business.1. INTRODUCTIONTransformation processes that take place in the business world inevitably cause market changes, make new demands and pose new challenges for modern societies, among the most important of which is the aim to foster entrepreneurship and develop entrepreneurial skills. These changes in the business environment demand certain behavior from individuals, characterized by such attributes as innovation, initiative, risk tolerance, creativity and self- confidence, proactivity and ability to recognize opportunities and implement them, ability to make swift and rational decisions, take risks, communicate, and lead. This set of attributes is described by scientists as entrepreneurship.Entrepreneurship aspects in the global context have been studied for several decades and are increasingly often actualized not only in management and economics, but also in education, politics, psychology and other studies: entrepreneurship concepts (Gorman et al., 1997; Hisrich, Peters, 1998; Timmons, Spinelli, 2003; Kirby, 2004; Turner, Nguyen, 2005), entrepreneurial abilities and attributes (Caird, 1991; Koh, 1996; Collins, Kunz, 2007) are discussed, the content of abilities characteristic to an enterprising person are revealed (Gartner, 1988; Garavan, O'Cinneide, 1994; Raffo et al., 2000). Entrepreneurship analysis receives less attention in Lithuania, as it is considered to be an intricate, complex phenomenon, involving many areas of scientific and practical activities. Some authors (Stripeikis, 2008; Solnyskiniene, 2008; Strazdiene, 2009; Zuperka, 2009, 2010, 2011; Ramanaus- -kiene et al., 2011; Zidonis, 2012) also examine the concept of entrepreneurship, entrepreneurial skills, discuss the prerequisites for developing entrepreneurial skills and models for entrepreneurship education in their papers. It should be noted that the majority of scientific papers and studies usually analyze youth entrepreneurship even though regulations governing the EU and Lithuanian youth policies emphasize the post-secondary students (i.e. students at institutions of higher education (universities and colleges) who study in programs conferring a degree) as one of the most important focus groups - who have a potential for creating new jobs and ensuring long-term sustainable economic growth of a country.Despite the fact that both in scientific and political contexts one of the main prerequisites for increasing youth employment is encouraging youth to do business (create new businesses, self-employment, intra-partnership), statistical data reveals a rather difficult situation of youth involvement in entrepreneurship. As stated in Youth-Investing and empowering, EU Youth Report (2009), the proportion of young people running their own business is very low in Europe: about 4% of young people aged 15-24 and 9% of 25-29 year-olds are self-employed. In all EU Member States, the percentage of self- employed is higher in the 25-29 age group than among the 15-24 year-olds, and the rate of self-employed persons does not reach 10% of the employed population for the age group 25-29 except in Greece, Italy, Cyprus, Poland, Romania and Slovakia. …