Constrained Gazelles: High Potentials in West Africa’s Informal Economy

Grimm, Michael; Knorringa, Peter; Lay, Jann

doi:10.1016/j.worlddev.2012.03.009

Cited by 168 publications

(167 citation statements)

References 21 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

157

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…In both definitions, one would expect choice entrepreneurs, especially those motivated by profit, to be among the successful (or potentially successful) self-employed. Using the methodology of Grimm, Knorringa and Lay (2012), Gindling and Newhouse (2012) find that, according to both definitions, just over 35 percent of self employed are "high potential", and that there is significant variability across regions (see Table 3). Moreover, and as might be suspected, the share of "entrepreneurs" among the self employed is highest in high income countries, and is roughly increasing by income level.…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Perhaps the most direct assessment of the importance of "entrepreneurs" among the self employed, albeit limited to West Africa, comes from the original paper by Grimm, Knorringa and Lay (2012). Using a set of "1-2-3" surveys, their objective is to identify three groups: the top performers (defined as the top 40% of self-employed, based on value added per unit of physical capital, among the 25% largest enterprises defined the amount of capital), the "constrained gazelles" (entrepreneurs who resemble the top performers but are not yet successful) and "survival entrepreneurs with fundamentally different characteristics".…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

See 1 more Smart Citation

By Choice and by Necessity: Entrepreneurship and Self-Employment in the Developing World

Margolis

2014

Eur J Dev Res

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Standard-Nutzungsbedingungen:Die Dokumente auf EconStor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen Zwecken und zum Privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden.Sie dürfen die Dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle Zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen.Sofern die Verfasser die Dokumente unter Open-Content-Lizenzen (insbesondere CC-Lizenzen) zur Verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen Nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten Lizenz gewährten Nutzungsrechte. www.econstor.eu Over half of all workers in the developing world are self-employed. Although some selfemployment is chosen by entrepreneurs with well-defined projects and ambitions, roughly two thirds results from individuals having no better alternatives. The importance of selfemployment in the overall distribution of jobs is determined by many factors, including social protection systems, labor market frictions, the business environment, and labor market institutions. However, self-employment in the developing world tends to be low productivity employment, and as countries move up the development path, the availability of wage employment grows and the mix of jobs changes. In the developing world, wage employment is often the exception rather than the norm. 1 In the least developed countries, agriculture, often based in family farms with unpaid labor, can make up the majority of employment. As households migrate to urban areas and countries develop, nonagricultural self-employment often picks up where agricultural employment left off. Only as countries move up the development scale does wage employment become a large share of total employment. Accordingly, the World Bank's 2013 World Development Report, which focused on jobs, paid a significant amount of attention to the question of self-employment and entrepreneurship in the developing world. Terms of use: Documents in D I S C U S S I O N P A P E R S E R I E SThe ubiquity of self-employment in low-and middle-income countries raises several important questions that this paper seeks to answer. First, how much self-employment is there in the developing world? Second, is self-employment in these countries a choice or a constraint? Third, to what extent does self-employment in the developing world correspond to the idea of "entrepreneurship"? And finally, from a normative perspective, is so much self-employment a good thing for developing countries? This paper addresses each of these questions by summarizing the wide academic literature on self-employment and development and presents additional evidence to provide a more complete picture where empirical evidence is more limited. The approach adopted here allies theoretical arguments (in particular, with respect to the "choice or constraint" question) with empirical results so as to provide a more complete vision of each issue.The structure of this paper follows the four questions above. Section 1 takes a detailed look at the data to describe the prevalence o...

show abstract

mentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

By Choice and by Necessity: Entrepreneurship and Self-Employment in the Developing World

Margolis

2014

Eur J Dev Res

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…Informal enterprises display less innovation and adoption of new technologies and that which does occur is more adaptation and imitation (Grimm et al, 2012;Kabecha, 1998;Wunsch-Vincent et al, 2015), and for some this is the primary reason for the productivity gap between developed and developing economies (Farrell, 2004;Palmade, 2005). Here, three basic control variables are used: quality certification, a dummy variable with the value of 1, indicating the enterprise has an internationally-recognized certification and 0 otherwise; presence of a website, a dummy variable with a value of 1 when the enterprise uses a website for business and 0 otherwise, and the use of e-mail, a dummy variable with the value of 1 when an enterprise uses e-mail with suppliers and clients, and 0 otherwise.…”

Section: Control Variablesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Business Registration and Firm Performance: Some Lessons From India

Williams

Kedir

2016

J. Dev. Entrepreneurship

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The aim of this paper is to evaluate the impacts on future firm performance of a firm deciding to register from the outset of its operations. Until now, the assumption has been that starting up registered is linked to higher future firm performance. Reporting World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES) data collected in 2014 on 9,281 formal enterprises in India, and controlling for other determinants of firm performance as well as the endogeneity of the registration decision, the finding is that formal enterprises that start up unregistered and spend longer unregistered have significantly higher subsequent annual sales and employment growth rates compared with those registered from the outset. When the number of years spent unregistered is included, there are also productivity gains from delaying registration. The tentative explanation is that in this weak institutional environment, the advantages of registering from the outset are outweighed by the benefits of deferring registration. Evaluating the policy implications, the argument is that there is a need to shift away from the conventional eradication approach toward unregistered startups based on the assumption they are unproductive, and toward a more facilitating approach that improves the benefits of being registered and tackles the systemic formal institutional deficiencies that lead entrepreneurs to delay their decision to register.

show abstract

“…As Grimm et al (2012) discuss, various types of segmentation have been identified in different strands of the informality literature, often focusing on two segments: a lowerand an upper-tier segment. In the framework of Ranis and Stewart (1999), the two segments are referred to as the traditional and the modern segment.…”

Section: Data and Measurementmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In order to test whether formal subcontracting is associated with an expansion of the traditional versus the modern segments of the informal manufacturing sector, one needs to identify these segments. Because there is no agreement on the number of segments and the boundaries that define them (Grimm et al 2012), we propose a continuous, multi-dimensional measure of modernity at the state-industry level. This modernity index is based on the start-of-period capital-labor ratio, location of enterprises, average number of hired workers per enterprise, and technical qualifications of enterprise owners.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Formal sector subcontracting and informal sector employment in Indian manufacturing

Moreno-Monroy

Pieters

Erumban

2014

IZA J Labor Develop

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Using nationally representative survey data of Indian manufacturing enterprises spanning the period 1995-2006, we analyze the link between formal sector subcontracting and informal sector employment. A novelty in our analysis is that this relationship is allowed to differ between modern and traditional segments of the informal sector. We show that formal sector subcontracting is positively related to employment growth only in the most modern segments of the informal sector. Increased subcontracting cannot explain the persistently high employment in traditional informal manufacturing activities in India. Instead, subcontracting can contribute to job creation in relatively modern segments of the informal sector. JEL codes: J21, O14, O17

show abstract

Constrained Gazelles: High Potentials in West Africa’s Informal Economy

Cited by 168 publications

References 21 publications

By Choice and by Necessity: Entrepreneurship and Self-Employment in the Developing World

By Choice and by Necessity: Entrepreneurship and Self-Employment in the Developing World

Business Registration and Firm Performance: Some Lessons From India

Formal sector subcontracting and informal sector employment in Indian manufacturing

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About