Abstract:We analyze the spatial determinants of entrepreneurship in India in the manufacturing and services sectors. Among general district traits, quality of physical infrastructure and workforce education are the strongest predictors of entry, with labor laws and household banking access also playing important roles. We also find extensive evidence of agglomeration economies among manufacturing industries. In particular, supportive incumbent industrial structures for input and output markets are strongly linked to higher establishment entry rates. In comparison to the U.S., regional conditions in India play a stronger relative role for the spatial patterns of entrepreneurship compared to incumbent industry locations.

We investigate the impact of transport infrastructure on the organisation and efficiency of manufacturing activity. The Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) project upgraded a central highway network in India. Manufacturing activity grew disproportionately along the network. These findings hold in straight-line IV frameworks and are not present on a second highway that was planned to be upgraded at the same time as GQ but subsequently delayed. Both entrants and incumbents facilitated the output growth, with scaling among entrants being important. The upgrades facilitated better industrial sorting along the network and improved the allocative efficiency of industries initially positioned on GQ.Adequate transport infrastructure is an essential ingredient for economic development and growth. Rapidly expanding countries like India and China face severe constraints on their transport infrastructure. Business leaders, policy makers and academics describe infrastructure as a critical hurdle for sustained growth that must be met with public funding but to date there is a limited understanding of the economic impact of those projects. We study how proximity to a major new road network affects the organisation of manufacturing activity, especially the location of new plants, through industry-level sorting and the efficiency of resource allocation.We exploit a large-scale highway construction and improvement project in India, the Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) project. The analysis compares districts located 0-10 kilometres from the GQ network to districts 10-50 kilometres away, and we utilise time series variation in the sequence in which districts were upgraded and differences in the characteristics of industries and regions that were affected. Our study employs establishment-level data that provide new insights into the sources of growth and their efficiency improvements.The GQ upgrades stimulated significant growth in organised manufacturing (formal sector) in the districts along the highway network, even after excluding the four major cities that form the nodal points of the quadrilateral. Long-differenced estimations suggest output levels in these districts grew by 49% over the decade after the construction began. This growth is not present in districts 10-50 kilometres from the GQ network nor in districts adjacent to another major Indian highway system that was

This study examines the role of the Indian diaspora in the outsourcing of work to India. Our data are taken from oDesk, the world's largest online platform for outsourced contracts, where India is the largest country in terms of contract volume. We use an ethnic name procedure to identify ethnic Indian users of oDesk in other countries around the world. We find very clear evidence that diaspora-based links matter on oDesk, with ethnic Indians in other countries 32% (9 percentage points) more likely to choose a worker in India. Yet, the size of the Indian diaspora on oDesk and the timing of its effects make clear that the Indian diaspora was not a very important factor in India becoming the leading country on oDesk for fulfilling work. In fact, multiple pieces of evidence suggest that diaspora use of oDesk increases with familiarity of the platform, rather than a scenario where diaspora connections serve to navigate uncertain environments. We further show that diaspora-based contracts mainly serve to lower costs for the company contacts outsourcing the work, as the workers in India are paid about the market wage for their work. These results and other observations lead to the conclusion that diaspora connections continue to be important even as online platforms provide many of the features that diaspora networks historically provided (e.g., information about potential workers, monitoring and reputation foundations).

The Policy Research Working Paper Series disseminates the findings of work in progress to encourage the exchange of ideas about development issues. An objective of the series is to get the findings out quickly, even if the presentations are less than fully polished. The papers carry the names of the authors and should be cited accordingly. The findings, interpretations, and conclusions expressed in this paper are entirely those of the authors. They do not necessarily represent the views of the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development/World Bank and its affiliated organizations, or those of the Executive Directors of the World Bank or the governments they represent.

This paper investigates the urbanization of the Indian manufacturing sector by combining enterprise data from formal and informal sectors. We find that plants in the formal sector are moving away from urban and into rural locations, while the informal sector is moving from rural to urban locations. While the secular trend for India's manufacturing urbanization has slowed down, the localized importance of education and infrastructure have not. Our results suggest that districts with better education and infrastructure have experienced a faster pace of urbanization, although higher urban-rural cost ratios cause movement out of urban areas. This process is associated with improvements in the spatial allocation of plants across urban and rural locations. Spatial location of plants has implications for policy on investments in education, infrastructure, and the livability of cities. The high share of urbanization occurring in the informal sector suggests that urbanization policies that contain inclusionary approaches may be more successful in promoting local development and managing its strains than those focused only on the formal sector.

Abstract:We quantify the link between the timing of state-level implementations of political reservations for women in India with the role of women in India's manufacturing sector. While overall employment of women in manufacturing does not increase after the reforms, we find significant evidence that more women-owned establishments were created in the unorganized/informal sector. These new establishments were concentrated in industries where women entrepreneurs have been traditionally active and the entry was mainly found among household-based establishments. We measure and discuss the extent to which this heightened entrepreneurship is due to channels like greater finance access or heightened inspiration for women entrepreneurs.

This paper explores the role of public investment in the process of economic growth, in the context of Pakistan's economy, using the vector autoregressive approach (VAR). Based on theoretical considerations, the model also includes private investment and public consumption besides public investment. The results show that growth is largely driven by private investment and that no strong inference can be drawn from the effects of public investment and public consumption on economic growth.

We analyze the spatial determinants of entrepreneurship in India in the manufacturing and services sectors. Among general district traits, quality of physical infrastructure and workforce education are the strongest predictors of entry, with labor laws and household banking quality also playing important roles. Looking at the district-industry level, we find extensive evidence of agglomeration economies among manufacturing industries. In particular, supportive incumbent industrial structures for input and output markets are strongly linked to higher establishment entry rates. We also find substantial evidence for the Chinitz effect where small local incumbent suppliers encourage entry. The importance of agglomeration economies for entry hold when considering changes in India's incumbent industry structures from 1989, determined before large-scale deregulation began, to 2005.