A study of Ghanaian entrepreneurs in 1968/69 reveals some of the factors which condition the chances of informal sector enterprisers expanding their business to formal sector dimensions. The difficulties they face in factor and product markets are partly the familiar ones of dependent economies, partly institutional and cultural in origin—e.g., workers' preference for ‘being one's own boss’. But these latter characteristics, too, are not just traditional legacies; they are modified or reinforced by economic circumstances. Likewise the factors which explain who succeeds are partly structural, partly cultural in nature.