Entrepreneurship brings about economic innovation and job formation, and its improvement can well account for the unemployment crisis. However, many barriers either stop entrepreneurs from entering the market, or lead their business to failure after entering. These barriers have been sparsely and case dependently reported in the literature, but, to the best of our knowledge, no studies have been yet designated to investigate the general barriers to entrepreneurship.

This paper tries to bridge this gap by reviewing the most relevant and available literature to elicit the major general barriers to entrepreneurship. Eleven general barriers to entrepreneurship are identified and supported by the related literature. Since these barriers are not independent and unconnected, but interrelated and interactive, understanding the interactions among them can help decision makers in determining appropriate overcoming measures. In order to model these interactions this paper utilizes interpretive structural modeling (ISM) which has shown to be an efficient approach for analyzing systematic interactions among barriers. We distinct barriers into two groups of inside and outside barriers and with the support of the ISM-based model, we show that inside barriers are dependent on outside barriers. Corrupted and unsupportive business environment then, shows to be the major driving barrier to entrepreneurship.