Economic growth requires confidence in the state's ability to enforce secure exchange. But when states selectively enforce rule of law, political considerations can moderate the trust that buyers have in sellers.
Property rights are important for economic exchange, but in much of the world they are not publicly guaranteed. Private market associations can fill this gap by providing an institutional structure to enforce agreements, but with this power comes the ability to extort from group members.
Alfonsi, Bandiera, Bassi, Burgess, Rasul, Sulaiman and Vitali (2019) design a labor market experiment to compare demand- and supply-side policies to tackle youth unemployment, a key issue in low-income countries.
In Ethiopia, Blattman, Dercon and Franklin (2019) randomly assign mostly female jobseekers to receive an industrial job offer or an unconditional cash transfer, meant to spur self-employment.
Many reports have described Chinese engagement in Africa as “neo-imperialism” and “authoritarian capitalism”, exploiting resources and local labour while undermining democracy.
Is there a policy rationale for actively trying to encourage small firms to formalise? In the last two decades, hundreds of regulatory reforms have been implemented in countries across the world with the primary objective of making it easier to formally register a business.
What explains differences in productivity across firms and countries? For the past decade, a project called the World Management Survey (WMS) has been collecting management data to understand the role of management practices as an important factor in explaining variation in firm productivity.
