Publications
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Title: Job Creation and Destruction in South Africa
PEDL Project: Exploring Dynamics in South African firms
Authors: Andrew Kerr, Martin Wittenberg and Jairo Arrow
Analysts of the South African labour market have predominantly used household surveys to analyse the labour market. It has been more difficult to explore labour demand from the firrm side, as a result of limited data from relatively small cross sectional firm surveys, mainly funded by the World Bank. We use the Quarterly Employment Survey conducted by Statistics South Africa that allows us to explore how South African enterprises create and destroy jobs, shedding light on many of the policy questions that are relevant in a high unemployment society like South Africa. We find job creation and destruction rates are similar to those found in OECD countries. There is little evidence that labour legislation creates rigidities that prevent firms from hiring or firing workers. We also find that larger firms are better net creators of jobs than small firms and that net job creation rates are negative in manufacturing, consistent with work using household surveys. Our research has important policy implications- particularly for the National Planning Commission's suggestion that new jobs will come mainly from small and medium sized firms. Our research suggests this is not likely without changes to policy or legislation.
Title: SME Registration Evidence from a Randomized Controlled Trial in Bangladesh
PEDL Project: Exit from Informality: Carrot and Stick (2nd Round)
Authors: Giacomo De Giorgi and Aminur Rahman
Informality is pervasive in developing countries. In Bangladesh, the majority of firms are informal and as such they might not have access to prime markets, while lowering the tax base. The authors implemented an information campaign on registration, including both the step-by-step procedures and the potential benefits from registration. They find that the treatment made firms more aware of the procedures, but had no impact on actual registration. The results point toward potentially low benefits and high indirect costs of registration as the main barriers to formality (e.g. access to markets, taxation, labor and product regulations).
PEDL project: Highways, Firm Productivity, and Allocative Efficiency in India (2nd Round)
Authors: Ejaz Ghani, Arti Grover Goswami, William R. Kerr
We investigate the impact of the Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) highway project on the Indian organized manufacturing sector using enterprise data. The GQ project upgraded the quality and width of 5,846 km of roads in India. We find several positive effects for non-nodal districts located 0-10 km from GQ that are not present in districts 10-50 km away, most notably higher entry rates and increases in plant productivity. These results are not present for districts located on another major highway system, the North-South East-West corridor (NS-EW). Improvements for portions of the NS-EW system were planned to occur at the same time as GQ but were subsequently delayed. The GQ upgrades further helped spread economic activity to moderate-density districts and intermediate cities.
Title: Flying Geese in Ethiopia’s Leather Industry? Understanding Asian/Chinese Impact on the Leather Value Chain in Ethiopia
Authors: Deborah Brautigam, Tang Xiaoyang, Margaret S. McMillan
Presentation for Ideas for Growth – International Growth Centre
Title: Transforming the Missing Middle
PEDL project: Managerial Capital and Business Transformation in Low-Income Countries (1st Round)
Authors: Stephen Anderson Macdonald
Roughly two billion people in the world live on $2 a day or less. Of these a staggering 50 per cent are estimated to be micro entrepreneurs, running a small business to make ends meet but employing only a handful of people. If just a small proportion of these entrepreneurs were encouraged to grow and invest in their business, and hire more employees, it could transform the fortunes of the developing economies, and billions of people living in poverty. But how?
Title: Mobile Payments, Conflict and Corruption in Afghanistan
PEDL Project: "Using Mobile Salary Payments to Improve Afghan Firm Performance" (1st Round)
Authors: Joshua Blumesntock, Michael Callen, Tarek Ghani
Presentation for the 2012 Evidence to Action (E2A) Research Challenge
Title: Agricultural Productivity and Structural Transformation. Evidence from Brazil
PEDL Project: Agricultural Productivity and Structural Transformation. Evidence from Brazil (1st Round)
Authors: Paula Bustos, Bruno Caprettini, Jacopo Ponticelli
Classical models of structural transformation stress that productivity growth in agriculture increases income per capita, generating demand for manufacturing goods. However, Matsuyama (1992) notes that the positive effects of agricultural productivity on industrialization occur only in closed economies, while in open economies a comparative advantage in agriculture can slow down industrial growth. In this paper we argue that this conclusion depends on the factor bias of agricultural technical change. In particular, if technical change is strongly labor saving, then increases in agricultural productivity can lead to industrialization even in an open economy. We find that areas affected by labor saving technical change in agriculture experienced faster manufacturing growth.