This paper reviews the recent literature in economics on small-scale entrepreneurship (“microentrepreneurship”) in low-income countries. Major themes in the literature include the determinants and consequences of joining the formal sector; the impacts of access to credit and other financial services; the impacts of business training; barriers to hiring; and the distinction between self-employment by necessity and self-employment as a calling. The paper devotes special attention to unique issues that arise with female entrepreneurship.
Firms, workers, and consumers in developing countries are increasingly connected to each other and the rest of the world through the internet. Can this connectivity transform poor economies, as techno-optimists hope, or are there more deeply rooted barriers to economic development?
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.
Although global flows of foreign direct investment (FDI) have not recovered since the 2008 financial crisis, flows to developing countries have continued to register a very modest growth. But what is the impact of these FDI inflows on the recipient developing economies?
Bargaining over real prices with microenterprise owners in Ghana, we show that sellers with less per capita household liquidity agree to lower sale prices.
Following the first confirmed cases of COVID-19 pandemic in mid-March 2020, the Ethiopia government imposed stringent measures to combat the spread of the virus including borderland control measures, travel restrictions, social distancing measures, and lockdowns.
We experimentally study the impact of substantially larger enterprise loans, in collaboration with an Egyptian lender. Larger loans generate small average impacts, but machine learning using psychometric data reveals dramatic heterogeneity.
