In principle, firms in developing countries benefit from the fact that advanced technologies and products have already been developed in industrialized countries and can simply be adopted, a process often referred to as industrial upgrading. But for many firms, this advantage has remained elusive.

This project studies a randomized, large-scale unconditional cash transfer program in Kenya, and find a meaningful increase in revenues for enterprises in areas experiencing a greater volume of cash transfers.

In Ethiopia, researchers randomly assigned mostly female jobseekers to receive an industrial job offer or an unconditional cash transfer, meant to spur self-employment. In the first year they found positive impacts of the cash transfers on occupational choice, income and health.

This paper reviews the recent literature in economics on small-scale entrepreneurship (“microentrepreneurship”) in low-income countries.