A Retrospective and Prospective Analysis of Social Entrepreneurship: Popular and Solidarity Economy in Ecuador

Social entrepreneurship in Ecuador has reached a level of importance, both in the economic and social spheres as well as at the academic and scientific level, thus becoming an important indicator for the socioeconomic development of a country. From a theoretical point of view, this paper performs a conceptual review, and analyzes policies and regulations related to popular and solidarity economy that provide an appropriate frame of reference for the study of this subject. The main objective of this work is to analyze the phenomenon of social entrepreneurship from an evolutionary, sectoral and gender perspective, approaching the main characteristic elements of this type of entrepreneurship, adopting the case of Ecuador in the period 2000–2018 as an analytical context. © 2021, The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG.