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‘Helping a Large Number of People Become a Little Less Poor’: The Logic of Survival Entrepreneurs
Abstract
Survival and growth-oriented entrepreneurs follow qualitatively different logics. In this chapter we retrace the scattered previous theorization of this distinction and present a consolidated set of key characteristics of the two types of enterprises, enriched by our own observations in the field. Our main purpose is to typify the different rationalities of the two groups of entrepreneurs. Secondly, we argue that because most existing interventions are based on the implicit assumption that all entrepreneurs are growth-oriented, they often fail to address the specific needs of survivalists. Finally, we outline an intervention rationale more attuned to the logic of survival entrepreneurs.
... It is Zimbabwe's "new millennium crisis" (Dzawanda & Matsa, 2023, p. 204). The activities of informal business tourists often provide the primary household income or supplement income to improve household food security, catalyse employment and improve -even if only marginally -local living standards (Berner et al., 2023). The responses to qualitative interviews with Zimbabwean informal business tourists confirm this broad picture of the essential drivers for women participants in the informal economy of business tourism in Southern Africa (Dzawanda & Matsa, 2021;Ngwenya, 2023). ...
Across sub-Saharan Africa, a substantial economy benefits from informal business tourism. In Southern Africa, the central element in informal business tourism is women's activities, who are informal cross-border shoppers and traders. The article investigates this neglected aspect of informal business tourism and unpacks the organisation of the key circuits of informal business tourism in urban Southern Africa. Major findings disclose that Johannesburg is established as the pivot of these regional shopping circuits. In the post-apartheid period, an infrastructure emerged in the inner city of Johannesburg to facilitate the operations of informal business tourists. The entrepôt operates as a transit tourism space, a conduit for channelling mainly Chinese products to destinations elsewhere in Africa. It is a space that connects the formal to the informal and the local to the global. Arguably, the practices of these informal business tourists are shaping new economic spaces in urban Southern Africa. The drivers and multiple challenges of women participants are explored through a synthesis of the recorded experiences of Zimbabwean women.
... However, empirical evidence shows that most micro and small enterprises never develop the business beyond a certain scale and only a small minority of them manage to upgrade to the next level of productivity, income, and employment (Berner, Gomez and Knorringa, 2008). These types of establishments seem to be very essential to the economy, but the potential for every business is doubtful (Davidsson and Wiklund, 2006). ...
The study was conducted to identify determinant factors that led to the survival and growth of the DTI assisted micro and small enterprises in Davao Region, Philippines. Particularly, it analyzed entrepreneurs’ and enterprises’ profile, entrepreneurial characteristics, human resource practices, marketing strategies, sources of funds and business growth of these enterprises. Asset growth was used as an indicator to measure firm growth. Data were gathered from micro and small enterprises who are in the business for at least five years. These enterprises were randomly selected within the municipalities and component city of Davao Region, Philippines. To realize the objectives, the study used descriptive and regression research designs. A self-structured and modified survey questionnaire was utilized to collect primary data from micro and small enterprises. Statistical analysis was executed through frequency counts, percentages, means and logistic regression. The micro and small enterprises in Davao Region are dominated by females, aged 41 to 50 years old, married and college degree holders. More than half of these enterprises employed 1 to 5 workers in their firm. Majority of them have existed between five to ten years and mostly engaged in manufacturing or production business. Several characteristics were present most of the time in these entrepreneurs. Human resource practices were usually implemented, and marketing mix strategies were always adopted. They also frequently used internal finance as business revolving funds. Likewise, more than one third of them chose commercial or rural banks for external financing. Business growth of most micro and small enterprises for an average of five years has high growth rate. Amongst the variables used in the study, the need for achievement, locus of control, and external source of finance significantly predicted business growth of micro and small enterprises.
Keywords: Micro and small enterprises, business growth, asset growth, external source of finance, need of achievement, locus of control, binary logistic regression.
... MSEs give millions of underprivileged people around the world the chance to obtain jobs, education, training, and experience. The majority of small businesses, however, never expand their operations beyond a particular scale, and only a small fraction can advance to the next level of productivity, income, and employment, according to empirical data (Berner / Gomez / Knorringa 2008, as cited by Aimee Hampel-Milagrosa,2014). ...
Purpose: The aim of this study is to ascertain the perceived impacts of implementing the microenterprise law and use it as a global benchmark for other international laws concerning microenterprises. Theoretical framework: The Grand Unified Theory of Business Development by Varun Sharma (2015) served as the theoretical foundation of this study as it suggests how a firm should be run for the greatest profit, whether it is a micro, small, medium, or large corporation. Design/methodology/approach: The qualitative research design was used wherein qualitative data were gathered thru the conduct of structured individual interviews and small focus group discussions with the stakeholders namely; Microenterprise operators/owners, consumers, suppliers, employees, and government bodies using the five law incentives and privileges as the determinants of its impact. Findings: The results showed that the impact of the implementation of the microenterprise law (BMBE Law) as perceived by BMBE owners, consumers, suppliers, employees, and government bodies was generally positive and favorably advantageous to all five identified stakeholders which were further categorized into various themes and category. Research, Practical & Social implications: The study affects the financial status of microenterprises as it measures the impact of government-aided assistance as the basis of providing enhanced benefits and privileges for microenterprises for eventual conversion to a higher form of business formation. Originality/value: The study paved the way for creating a value-adding understanding of how impactful government-aided assistance and privileges to the microenterprises are the foundation of a strong business economy.
This chapter examines two different aspects of the way that the energy system influences women’s capacity to earn an income: energy as an input into women’s enterprises and the energy sector as a source of employment either running energy enterprises or as employees. The evidence indicates that the energy sector could be more gender equitable and socially inclusive which is a universal commonality. Gender norms play a role in determining what is suitable work for women. Indeed, there is still a way to go in terms of meeting women’s aspirations to work in or their enterprises to benefit from the services energy enables.
Research Context: microentrepreneurs generation in a social organization in Campinas region.
Research Problem and Goals: during participant observation in an entrepreneurship training of 60 people, high abandonment and consequently low rate of business generation was observed. The objective of this research is, based on understanding the difficulties and obstacles during the training process of micro-entrepreneurs, propose an artifact aimed to maximize the investment of Institutions that promote entrepreneurship, as well as the micro-entrepreneurs.
Methodological approach: through an action research, a group of 8 people was observed during the entrepreneur training. Considering the learning generated during the action research, a proposal of an artifact for micro-entrepreneurs training was elaborated.
Expected Results: the expected result is the proposal of an artifact that can contribute to the reducing of entrepreneurship student abandonment, as well as an increase of new business generation, improving the performance of entrepreneurship programs.
Expected Practical Implications: the use of an artifact for micro-entrepreneurs training, suited to the reality of this group, could increase the chances of success of entrepreneurial initiatives and the efficiency of public investments.
Originality and Values: there are few studies addressing the difficulties during the training process of a microentrepreneur and the consequent effectiveness of training programs. This study aims to contribute to the training process of microentrepreneurs
Type of Research: action Research
Keywords: Micro entrepreneurship; Action Research; Minorities; Entrepreneurship Education; Incubators.
In Africa, entrepreneurship remains predominantly informal, but the rapid spread of mobile phone and Internet use is often viewed as an opportunity to boost the productivity and output of informal firms. Yet little is known on how informal entrepreneurs use these technologies for their business. The purpose of this paper is to open the black box of ‘mobile usage’ and investigate its effects on the performance of informal micro and small enterprises. To do so, we develop an original conceptual framework of mobile usage and apply a three‐step empirical approach based on a unique dataset of informal firms in Dakar. The first step allows us to identify rich ‘mobile usage’ measures that examine the different economic functions supported by mobile phones (coordination, finance and management) and the multiple dimensions of use (range and intensity). The second step identifies four user profiles with specific forms of appropriation: disconnected entrepreneurs, networkers, Internet explorers and digital entrepreneurs. The third step uses a stochastic frontier approach to investigate whether these profiles increase the economic efficiency of informal firms. Our findings suggest that while the most advanced uses of mobile phones have an incremental impact on sales efficiency, the potential for improvement remains limited. Only networkers' coordination uses show a significant impact on value added and profit, while the ways in which Internet explorers and digital entrepreneurs use a mobile phone have only a limited impact.
Information and Communication Technologies (ICTs) and, particularly, the development of the internet during the last decades of the last century have represented a fundamental change throughout different dimensions of our societies. The interactions between technological change and globalisation because of the reduction in transportation costs and improvements in global transportation have fostered productivity and innovation around the globe, but they have also changed the nature of work. In this section, we compile relevant publications regarding the link between technological innovation and changes in the nature of work and labour over the last three decades putting special attention to the role of high-qualified migrants, automation and the role of multinationals, among others.
Background: Despite the high youth unemployment levels, especially in sub-Saharan Africa, participation in the agricultural sector remains low. The agricultural sector provides valuable opportunities of employment, which could contribute towards relieving the high levels of unemployment and enhancing livelihoods of families in rural areas. Youth are also seen as the future of the agricultural sector and food production.
Aim: To determine whether entrepreneurial dimensions, along with assets within the sustainable livelihoods framework, influences participation of youth in the agricultural sector.
Setting: Focus is on youth and the influence of endogenous and exogenous factors on their participation in the agricultural sector.
Methods: Entrepreneurial dimensions of 440 youth participants were derived from statements related to entrepreneurial skills and competencies by means of principal component analysis and combined with factors from the sustainable livelihood framework in a multinomial logistic regression.
Results: It was found that the youth are heterogeneous in their endogenous and exogenous resources. Youth involved in the sector are more likely to have access to land and extension services, experience in the sector and support initiatives. In terms of entrepreneurial dimensions, youth involved are more inclined to believe in themselves and are more likely to take advantage of opportunities (pull entrepreneurship). The results show that policies and programmes should consider both endogenous and exogenous factors and combinations thereof to attract and enhance youth participation in the agricultural sector.
Conclusion: Policy and programme development should consider the heterogeneity of youth in terms of their access to resources and entrepreneurial dimensions to enhance their participation in the agricultural sector. Participation in agriculture requires more than only access to land, and other individual physical resources attention should also be given to endogenous factors of individuals and combinations of different resources.
This paper provides new evidence at the intersectionality of gender, family status, and culture by focusing on a previously little researched group of middle-class women in an emerging economy. While the existing literature examines both structural and normative constraints for women entrepreneurship, little is known about the gains from relaxing structural constraints for women when compared to men. In addition to examining this new question, the paper sheds light on the binding nature of normative constraints for women entrepreneurship that persist in a patriarchal economy even when structural constraints are significantly eased. Using a mixed-methods approach, the empirical results suggest that higher resource availability differentially impact the entrepreneurial intentions of women when compared to men indicating the strong presence of normative barriers that inhibit their entrepreneurship. These normative barriers emerge through the roles people play within women’s life spheres inhibiting their entrepreneurial intentions.
This article compares inequality in employment across demographic groups in the Great Recession and the COVID-19 pandemic. We develop a measure to capture both how much employment declines during a recession and the persistence of employment losses. Results show a significant shift of job loss from men in the Great Recession to women in the COVID-19 lockdown. White workers fare better than other racial/ethnic groups in both recessions. Black and Hispanic women are hit especially hard in the COVID-19 pandemic. With our job-loss measure, less-educated workers had modestly worse outcomes in the Great Recession. However, during COVID-19, less-educated workers suffer much more severe employment consequences than more-educated groups. We discuss long-term effects of employment inequality and how these findings are relevant to debates about policy responses.
This paper analyses the changing structure of employment and informality in India
during 2004-05 to 2018-19 using the unit level data of the Periodic Labour Force
Surveys (PLFS) and the Employment and Unemployment Surveys (EUS). The
study observes a decline in overall employment growth during 2011-12 to 2017-18
and a moderate increment during 2017-18 to 2018-19. While there is acceleration
in the formal sector jobs over this period, the increase is largely emanating from a
growth in the informal workers within the formal sector. Further, there is growing
informalisation within the formal regular employment too. The regional level analysis
indicates varying extent of informality across the states in terms of the degree of
socio-economic development. The emerging trends in employment and rising
informalisation calls for policy interventions in terms of providing remunerative
and decent work along with a technology-enabled social security system that can
facilitate the formalisation of labour markets.
Using national-level employment data, this paper explores both the supply and demand-side factors responsible for stalling India’s structural transformation on the employment side. We have found that although the overall LF participation has consistently been declining, the size of open unemployment and discouraged LF are rising at an unprecedented pace. This employment crisis arose because of the stalled structural transformation owing to the lack of effective demand for skilled workers in the non-farm sectors. This crisis is not only reflected in stagnant real wages, but it also adversely affected GDP growth and the incidence of poverty. Hence, unless measures are taken quickly, India’s demographic dividend, which ends in 2040, is under severe threat.
This paper describes the results from an evaluation of a public policy that offers scholarships to current and former public high school students, so that they can attend technical and vocational education courses free of charge. We use a waiting list randomized controlled trial in four municipalities in a southern Brazilian State (Santa Catarina) to quantify the effects of the program on school progression, labor market outcomes and non-cognitive skills. Our intention-to-treat estimates reveal substantial gender heterogeneity two years after program completion. Women experienced large gains in labor market outcomes and non-cognitive skills. Employment rose by 21 percentage points (or approximately 33%) and the gains in earnings are of more than 50%. Also, women who received the offer scored 0.5 σ higher on the synthetic index of non-cognitive skills and 0.69 σ higher on an extraversion indicator. We find no effects on the male sub-sample. These findings corroborate the evidence on gender heterogeneity in the labor market effects of technical and vocational education programs. We also perform a series of exercises to explore potential channels through which these effects arise.
This paper elaborates an aspirations–capabilities framework to advance our understanding of human mobility as an intrinsic part of broader processes of social change. In order to achieve a more meaningful understanding of agency and structure in migration processes, this framework conceptualises migration as a function of aspirations and capabilities to migrate within given sets of perceived geographical opportunity structures. It distinguishes between the instrumental (means-to-an-end) and intrinsic (directly wellbeing-affecting) dimensions of human mobility. This yields a vision in which moving and staying are seen as complementary manifestations of migratory agency and in which human mobility is defined as people’s capability to choose where to live, including the option to stay, rather than as the act of moving or migrating itself. Drawing on Berlin’s concepts of positive and negative liberty (as manifestations of the widely varying structural conditions under which migration occurs) this paper conceptualises how macro-structural change shapes people’s migratory aspirations and capabilities. The resulting framework helps to understand the complex and often counter-intuitive ways in which processes of social transformation and ‘development’ shape patterns of migration and enable us to integrate the analysis of almost all forms of migratory mobility within one meta-conceptual framework.
The explosion of the pandemic has been optimistically considered as the “last straw that breaks the camel’s back”. At the time of writing, after three months since its outburst, we can hardly find any sign of a “broken camel”: indeed, it could have been the opportunity to collectively question the current regime of production and appropriation, exclusion and marketization characterizing this phase of unjust “rentified capitalism”, but the route taken has largely seen a frightening combination of “business as usual” on the production side and pervasive forms of social control, limitations of individual and collective rights and the perpetuation of a false dichotomy between economic and health security. This pandemic, which under decent public health provisions might have been a controlled disease, is producing the most severe crisis after the Great Depression and has been used to implement forms of massive social control hardly conceivable in “advanced democracies”. Butterfly effects are well-known in complexity sciences. However, social scientists have still difficulties in understanding how a grain can make the sandcastle fall down. On the contrary, we are now under the actual risk of starting a “new normal” without dealing with the deep routes and origins of this crisis, with the dominant intellectual discourse pushing for maintaining and indeed reinforcing the status quo, established power and social blocks. This myopic strategy might end up in collectively disruptive socio-political transformations.
The marginalization of trade unions was a notable feature of the sovereign debt crisis in the Eurozone periphery. However, governments have recently imposed liberalizing reforms against union protests in the Eurozone core too. We argue that organized labour loses influence across the core-periphery divide because the 'new economic governance' puts national governments under enhanced pressure to compete against each other on wage and labour market flexibility-a process known as competitive internal devaluation. The article illustrates this argument through comparative quantitative indicators of liberalization and qualitative process-tracing in three core countries. Whereas Germany's outstanding competitiveness position allowed its unions to extract significant concessions, their counterparts in France and Finland faced unprecedented defeats from governments aiming to restore economic growth by closing down the competitiveness gap to Germany. Our findings highlight the class power implications of the Eurozone's reliance on the labour market as the main economic adjustment variable.
Workplace team resilience has been proposed as a potential asset for work teams to maintain performance in the face of adverse events. Nonetheless, the research on team resilience has been conceptually and methodologically inconsistent. Taking a multilevel perspective, we present an integrative review of the workplace team resilience literature to identify the conceptual nature of team resilience and its unique value over and above personal resilience as well as other team concepts. We advance resilience research by providing a new multilevel model of team resilience that offers conceptual clarification regarding the relationship between individual-level and team-level resilience. The results of our review may form the basis for the development of a common operationalization of team resilience, which facilitates new empirical research examining ways that teams can improve their adversity management in the workplace.
This article suggests that there is a mobility bias in migration research: by focusing on the “drivers” of migration — the forces that lead to the initiation and perpetuation of migration flows — migration theories neglect the countervailing structural and personal forces that restrict or resist these drivers and lead to different immobility outcomes. To advance a research agenda on immobility, it offers a definition of immobility, further develops the aspiration-capability framework as an analytical tool for exploring the determinants of different forms of (im)mobility, synthesizes decades of interdisciplinary research to help explain why people do not migrate or desire to migrate, and considers future directions for further qualitative and quantitative research on immobility.
Do emerging-market multinational enterprises (EMNEs) innovate after they have
acquired advanced countries’ innovative firms and have invested in regions with high
innovative capacity? Do EMNEs’ absorptive capacity and status positively moderate the
relationship between their post-deal innovative output and the innovative capacity of
the target firm and/or region? We explore these questions by analyzing the universe of
cross-border acquisitions accomplished by Chinese and Indian medium to high-tech
firms in Europe (EU28) and the USA during 2003–2011. We find that EMNEs benefit
from investing in regions with higher innovative capacities, with the exception of the
most innovative hubs where post-acquisition impacts on EMNEs’ innovative outputs
turn out to be less straightforward than we expected. We also observe that EMNEs are
often unable to benefit from innovative target firms, which is also in contrast with our
predictions. Hence, we do not find conclusive evidence about the positive impact of
EMNEs’ investments in developed countries. Rather, we reverse this perspective and
argue that it is not just a matter of how innovative the target actors are in the host
country, but of whether the investing EMNEs are able to mobilize these actors’
knowledge resources and interests to their own advantage. Only EMNEs with strong
knowledge bases and high status standing can make it, the rest remain stranded, no
matter how innovative their target firm or location is.
The increasingly rapid transnational movement of capital, commodities, services, information, and technology force labor institutions everywhere to respond to new challenges and pressures. This is evident in the effects of structural adjustment on political unionism in countries such as India and Mexico, in the shifts in employment practices and labor processes accompanying the privatization of state-owned enterprises in post-communist Europe and in China, and even in unanticipated shifts in industrial relations in Japan. The contributions - which span post-socialist economies as well as other late-industrializing ones -- emphasize how the comparison of the changing experiences of workers and labor institutions in late-industrializing and post-socialist settings can be employed to systematically explore the meaning and limits of the currently fashionable concept of “globalization” in settings with different historical inheritances and institutional structures. The comparisons also reveal important differences that distinguished industrial relations in socialist countries differed from those in post-colonial contexts, and the ways in which these differences may contribute to different patterns and outcomes in the transformation of industrial relations in the two contexts. The remainder of the chapter highlights similarities and differences in trends across the cases considered in the contributions to this volume, and goes on to inductively construct a theoretical scheme for tracing how varied historical inheritances in the late-industrializing and post-socialist economies create different sets of expectations, pressures, and challenges for economic reformers as well as for workers and organized labor. The role of unique historical factors and institutional structures is also considered, with new questions raised on the basis of specific variations that occur within or cut across the categories of post-socialist and post-colonial settings. The chapter concludes by suggesting that the concept of globalization is most useful when it is employed not as a universal model for projecting trajectories of institutional change but as a more restricted framework for capturing the common challenges facing labor and other economic actors in the process of economic adjustment.
Sooner or later, all young people have to go through a phase of transition from the educational system to paid work. However, the ease and speed of making a successful transition to a decent job depend crucially on the institutional setting in the respective country or region on the one hand and on the economic circumstances on the other hand. Under adverse institutional and economic conditions phases of transitions can last long and imply persistent scars on later employment experiences, and in fact, problematic institutions can aggravate the negative impact of recessions. Our contribution discusses the role of crisis periods as well as policy measures that influence youth labor markets both in European and developing countries. We highlight the role of labor market institutions in general, including vocational training systems, and the specific role crisis response measures can play in mitigating crisis effects that affect young people more than prime-aged workers due to their more vulnerable situation.
Contestations on mobile money franchising have emphasised the ability of enterprising mobile money agents to enhance financial inclusion and create employment opportunities in the labour market. Yet, empirical arguments point to mobile money encouraging socio-economic inequalities and a relationship between agents and tellers in which casualisation flourishes. This chapter explores the dynamic nature of the mobile money market in Kitwe with the aim to establish empirical insights into the link across labour relations, entrepreneurship and employment. This link is examined in the context of evolutions in market leadership and returns of participating firms and individuals on Kitwe’s mobile money scene. Key informant interviews extracted from 52 mobile money agents and tellers in Kitwe inform the in-depth understanding of vicissitudes in the mobile money landscape and subsequent implications for economic development.
This chapter addresses key challenges facing the Indian labour market in the post-reforms period that is overwhelmed by a growing informal labour force including migrants, and decline in the quality of jobs. The rising trend of informalisation and contractual work even in the formal sector has been a matter of concern as this has serious implications for even skilled and educated workers accepting jobs with suboptimal employment conditions. The rising divergence between share of wages and that of profits in the formal sector has been a disturbing trend. Even as existing plethora of labour laws had been often ineffective and hardly covered the informal workers the new Labour Codes legislated without adequate debate are unlikely to address longstanding issues facing informal labour. These legislations offer a free hand to capital to hire and fire to keep business growing. The absence of a robust labour agency for the informal workers has implied rights and social security benefits are compromised for them including those toiling for suppliers within the global production networks.
This chapter assesses the recent employment history of the North of England and its constituent sub-regions and cities within the context of broader trends in the UK and of major policy changes in the last two years. This chapter draws on previous surveys of the employment performance of the North and on recent statistics on Job Seeker’s Allowance, and underemployment estimates based on the Special License UK Labour Force Survey. This chapter describes the performance of the North during the long boom (1996 to 2006) and examines changes in the pattern of employment following the 2008/2009 recession. Logistic regression is used to explore patterns of involuntary part-time employment, broader time-related underemployment, and general and graduate-level over-education. The findings reveal that beyond relatively higher levels of unemployment, several of the sub-regions and cities of the North of England also suffer comparatively high levels of underemployment and over-education, suggesting a potential under-utilisation of skills in the Northern regions.
Measurement of the middle class has recently come to the center of policy debate in middle-income countries as they search for the potential engines of growth and good governance. This debate assumes, first, that there is a meaningful definition of class, and second, that the thresholds which define relatively homogeneous groups in terms of pre-determined sociological characteristics can be found empirically. This chapter aims at proposing a view of the middle class based on vulnerability to poverty. Following this approach, this chapter exploits panel data to determine the amount of comparable income—associated with a low probability of falling into poverty—which could define the lower bound of the middle class. It looks at absolute thresholds, challenging the view that people just above the poverty line are actually part of the middle class. In an analogy with poverty measurement, there is a degree of arbitrariness in the definition of specific thresholds, but the concept behind them is clear and economically meaningful. The estimated lower threshold is used in cross-section surveys to quantify the size and the evolution of middle classes in Chile, Mexico, and Peru over the past two decades. The evidence also shows that the middle class has increased significantly in all three countries. There is an important group of people, however, who cannot be defined as middle class from this perspective but remain vulnerable to fall back into poverty.
Social contract theories serve a twofold purpose: by addressing acute crises, they elaborate solutions to long-standing social paradoxes. The article reinterprets the stakes of the Covid pandemic from this perspective. Firstly, the long-lasting structural paradoxes of late modernity are linked to the acute crisis of the pandemic with the help of critical theories of late modernity. It is argued that the pandemic provides opportunity for revaluating those social contracts, which are based on universalist principles of justice. Secondly, two paradigmatic historical examples (Hobbes, Rawls) are overviewed in a meta-theoretical fashion, so that the dimensions of revaluation could be highlighted. Thirdly, the foundations of a post-pandemic social contract are outlined. As the pandemic is inseparable from the structural paradoxes caused by unconstrained systems based on universal principles of justice, the post-pandemic social contract aims at preventing the system paradoxes by revaluating their universal principles in a ‘trial of particularity’ (Derrida, Levinas).
India initiated liberal economic reforms in 1991 to transform a slow-growing, state-led economy into an open, export-oriented industrialising economy. Though economic growth has accelerated, industrialisation has suffered from the manufacturing sector's share and labour intensive sectors failing to improve in India's exports. The government launched the Make in India initiative in 2015 aimed at raising the manufacturing sector's share in GDP to 25 percent, and to create an additional 100 million jobs by 2022. Though official estimates show an optimistic image of small scale industries, they do not explain why India failed to boost industrial production as expected of the reforms. Why did they fail to keep the domestic market, let alone expand exports? What would it take to meet the ambitious policy goals of the initiative? This book attempts to address these questions. It looks at a series of case studies of the small industry to obtain an in-depth understanding of specific industries and locations to draw meaningful conclusions.
High skilled migrants and the policies designed to attract and select such individuals are widely championed. In formulating and evaluating such policies, however, policy makers and academics alike face significant challenges, since, from the perspective of policy, what it means to be high skilled remains a fluid concept. The resulting ambiguity stymies meaningful international comparisons of the mobility of skills, undermines the design and evaluation of immigration policies and hinders the measurement of human capital. In this paper, we adopt an inductive approach to examine how high skilled migrants are classified based upon states’ unilateral immigration policies, thereby highlighting the difficulties of comparing high skilled policies across countries. We further elucidate the challenges in measuring the outcomes of high skilled migration policies that arise due to differing national priorities in recording high skilled migrants. We conclude by making a number of policy recommendations, which if enacted, would bring clarity to scholars and policy makers alike in terms of being able to meaningfully compare the composition, and assess the efficacy of, high skilled migration policies across countries. In doing so we introduce three datasets comprising: harmonised high skill migration flow data, skilled occupational concordances and high skilled unilateral and bilateral migration policy data, which undergird our analysis and that can be built upon in years to come.
This article extends and elaborates the perspective on entrepreneurship articulated by Shane and Venkataraman (2000) and Venkataraman (1997) by explaining in more detail the role of opportunities in the entrepreneurial process. In particular, the article explains the importance of examining entrepreneurship through a disequilibrium framework that focuses on the characteristics and existence of entrepreneurial opportunities. In addition, the article describes several typologies of opportunities and their implications for understanding entrepreneurship.
Empirical Studies in Institutional Change is a collection of nine empirical studies by fourteen scholars. Dealing with issues ranging from the evolution of secure markets in seventeenth-century England to the origins of property rights in airport slots in modern America, the contributors analyse institutions and institutional change in various parts of the world and at various periods of time. The volume is a contribution to the new economics of institutions, which emphasises the role of transaction costs and property rights in shaping incentives and results in the economic arena. To make the papers accessible to a wide audience, including students of economics and other social sciences, the editors have written an introduction to each study and added three theoretical essays to the volume, including Douglass North's Nobel Prize address, which reflect their collective views as to the present status of institutional analysis and where it is headed.
This paper estimates the effect of a major skilled visa programme in Australia on the wages and occupation-specific skills performed by native workers. We combine data from the full population of approved Temporary Work Visa applications with the nationally representative Household, Income and Labour Dynamics in Australia (HILDA) longitudinal survey from 2005–2015. Our findings indicate that skilled international workers increase the wages of natives, and induce native workers to specialize in occupations associated with a high intensity of communication and cognitive skills. We find no evidence of negative effects of the visa programme on the wages of high-skilled or low-skilled native workers, or on previous migrants who may be close substitutes to the skilled visa holders.
We examine the changing relationship between unionization and wage inequality in Canada and the United States. Our study is motivated by profound recent changes in the composition of the unionized workforce. Historically, union jobs were concentrated among low‐skilled men in private sector industries. With the steady decline in private sector unionization and rising influence in the public sector, half of unionized workers are now in the public sector. Accompanying these changes was a remarkable rise in the share of women among unionized workers. Currently, approximately half of unionized employees in North America are women. While early studies of unions and inequality focused on males, recent studies find that unions reduce wage inequality among men but not among women. In both countries, we find striking differences between the private and public sectors in the effects of unionization on wage inequality. At present, unions reduce economy‐wide wage inequality by less than 10%. However, union impacts on wage inequality are much larger in the public sector. Once we disaggregate by sector, the effects of unions on male and female wage inequality no longer differ. The key differences in union impacts are between the public and private sectors—not between males and females.
This paper estimates whether individual personality traits, which are typically unobservable in survey data, influence the propensity to engage in interregional migration. We examine the big‐five personality traits: extraversion, openness to experience, conscientiousness, agreeableness, and emotional stability. We find that individuals with higher levels of extraversion and openness to experience are more likely to migrate. Moreover, individuals with low levels of agreeableness and emotional stability are more likely to migrate multiple times. Overall, our results show that personality traits are significant factors in the migration decision.
Labour market segmentation is at the forefront of national and European policy debates. While the European Commission and the OECD claim to promote what they see as more inclusive policies, academic observers remain sceptical. The dualization literature in particular points to stable equilibria that sustain divisions between labour market insiders and outsiders. In this article, we trace recent reform trajectories in a diverse group of nine European countries marked by a high share of temporary employment: France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Poland, Portugal, Slovenia, Spain and Sweden. Our case studies show that recent reforms of employment regulation involve much more dynamism than one would expect based on the experiences of the two preceding decades, or from dualization or insider–outsider theories. The reform trajectories display rather contradictory approaches, sometimes in close succession.
Workplace conditions and experiences powerfully influence mental health and individuals experiencing mental illness, including the extent to which people experiencing mental ill-health are ‘disabled’ by their work environments. This article explains how examination of the social suffering experienced in workplaces by people with mental illness could enhance understanding of the inter-relationships between mental health and workplace conditions, including experiences and characteristics of the overarching labour process. It examines how workplace perceptions and narratives around mental illness act as discursive resources to influence the social realities of people with mental ill-health. It applies Labour Process Theory to highlight how such discursive resources could be used by workers and employers to influence the power, agency and control in workplace environments and the labour process, and the implications such attempts might have for social suffering. It concludes with an agenda for future research exploring these issues.
Straightforward economic arguments point to the potential for large global output gains from movement of labor from less to more productive locations. Yet the politics of receiving countries seems resistant, characterized rather by efforts to limit migration or to stop it altogether. In this article we examine the foundations of claims of large welfare gains through free mobility, studying implications of liberalizing migration for world welfare under a variety of models, paying attention not only to overall gains but also to how gains are distributed and reviewing attempts to quantify the benefits. We conclude by asking how far considerations beyond economics motivate keenness to impose restrictions on migration.
Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Economics Volume 11 is August 2, 2019. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.
Do large firm dynamics drive the business cycle? We answer this question by developing a quantitative theory of aggregate fluctuations caused by firm-level disturbances alone. We show that a standard heterogeneous firm dynamics setup already contains in it a theory of the business cycle, without appealing to aggregate shocks. We offer an analytical characterization of the law of motion of the aggregate state in this class of models, the firm size distribution, and show that aggregate output and productivity dynamics display: (i) persistence, (ii) volatility, and (iii) time-varying second moments. We explore the key role of moments of the firm size distribution, and, in particular, the role of large firm dynamics, in shaping aggregate fluctuations, theoretically, quantitatively, and in the data.
Mobile money is a recent innovation that provides financial transaction services via mobile phone, including to the unbanked global poor. The technology has spread rapidly in the developing world, "leapfrogging" the provision of formal banking services by solving the problems of weak institutional infrastructure and the cost structure of conventional banking. This article examines the evolution of mobile money and its important role in widening financial inclusion. It explores the channels of economic influence of mobile money from a micro perspective, and critically reviews the empirical literature on the economic impact of mobile money. The evidence convincingly suggests that mobile money fosters risk-sharing, but direct evidence of the promotion of welfare and saving is still mostly rather less robust. © The Author(s) 2018. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / THE WORLD BANK.
Two plus two equals four; person X and person Y have equal access to higher education. It is not just playing on words if we start with the observation that the relationship of “equality” is both a logical and a sociological one. Moreover, the two dimensions of the term equality are connected in an interesting way.
Based on case studies of leading Chinese MNEs' international operations in developed countries, this study develops a reverse knowledge acquisition model of emerging market MNEs through subsidiary-led reverse learning, knowledge sharing and integration processes. It unpacks MNEs' external learning process and contributes to the literature by exploring three mechanisms of learning, sharing and integration. It finds three reverse learning channels, a multi-level hub-spoke type of knowledge acquiring mechanism, and a two-tier three-step integration mechanism. The learning mechanism confirms knowledge acquisition driven by reverse learning behaviours; the sharing mechanism enriches the community perspective of capability building and sharing; the integration mechanism provides an effective way of knowledge integration within the MNEs.
