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Encouraging entrepreneurship is viewed as a potential solution to the unemployment of young people (Aloulou, 2016). It has been perceived as an engine of socioeconomic growth by providing job opportunities and diverse goods/services to the population (Reynolds et al., 2000). Guerrero, (2008) state that entrepreneurship is seen as an innovative and creative process, which play the potential role in creating added and new value to products/services, increasing productivity, creating new job opportunities, revitalizing and diversifying markets, improving social welfare, and developing the national economy.
According, to official statistics from National Institute of Statistics for the third quarter of 2022, the unemployment rate is estimated at more than 37% among youth ages (15 - 24 year) (about 38.5% among men and 36.2% among women). It should be noted that the unemployment rate for higher education graduates increased to 24.3% in the third quarter of 2022 against 22.8% in the second quarter of the same year. This rate is 15.2% among men and 32.0% among women in the third quarter of 2022, according to the same source. The increasing rate of unemployment of higher education graduates is a major challenge for government. Tunisian Government has been offering many agencies and programs to encourage young people to start their own businesses. Moreover, during their educational lives, many universities offer entrepreneurship courses to foster entrepreneurship spirit in the society. These initiatives and programs have not enough impact on the number of business start-ups in Tunisia.
Understanding entrepreneurial intention is fundamental since it is considered a key factor for individuals to become entrepreneurs (Gird & Bagraim, 2008; Krueger et al., 2000; Mensah et al., 2021). Thus, countries that want their young people to be highly entrepreneurial should seek to know and explore the predictor dimensions of entrepreneurial intention.
As the entrepreneurial intention, is a planned behavior shaped by an individual’s attitude toward venturing, perceptions of abilities to operate their new venture and perceptions of social norms about venturing, we adopt the Theory of Planned Behaviour perspective to explain entrepreneurial intention.
The Theory of Planned Behavior has been one of the most widely used theories to explain entrepreneurial intention and this theory is composed of three dimensions (Fayolle & Gailly, 2015; Mensah et al., 2021; Zaremohzzabieh et al., 2019): attitude, subjective norm and perceived behavioral control toward entrepreneurship. However, the relative importance of each of these predictors varies across analyzed behaviors and situations (Ajzen, 1991). The Theory of Planned Behaviour model have not been widely tested to predict the formation of entrepreneurial intentions of university business students in developing countries such as Arab countries in general (Aloulou, 2016; Ahmed et al., 2019; Nasri & Morched, 2023) and Tunisia in particular. The study aimed to examine the determinants of entrepreneurial intention of university business students by using the Theory of Planned Behavior.