Money or ideas ? a field experiment on constraints to entrepreneurship in rural Pakistan

By X. Giné, G. Mansuri. 2014

229 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper identifies the relative importance of human and physical capital for entrepreneurship. A subset of rural microfinance clients were offered eight full time days of business training and the opportunity to participate in a loan lottery of up to Rs. 100,000 (USD 1,700), about seven times the average loan size. The study finds that business training increased business knowledge, reduced business failure, improved business practices and increased household expenditures by about $40 per year. It also improved financial and labor allocation decisions. These effects are concentrated among male clients, however. Women improve business knowledge but show no improvements in other outcomes. A cost-benefit analysis suggests that business training was not cost-effective for the microfinance institution, despite having a positive impact on clients. This may explain why so few microfinance institutions offer training. Access to the larger loan, in contrast, had little effect, indicating that existing loan size limits may already meet the demand for credit for these clients.

Subfields: Business and International Management, Economics and Econometrics, Safety Research

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/058dda05755cbaae79e64cde3b1709c850ad852d

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Citations in the corpus

Entrepreneurship Education and Training Programs around the World: Dimensions for Success (2014, unknown): “Glaub and Frese (2011) point to the more positive effects for programs that focus on the aforementioned psychological factors of entrepreneurship.”
Promoting Women's Economic Empowerment: What Works? (2014, background): “Continued Study Features Sample Intervention Findings Attanasio, Kugler, and Meghir (2011) Vocational training in urban Colombia Unemployed young people placed in lowest two deciles of income distribution 3 months in-classroom training and 3 months of on-the-job training; trainees receive daily stip”
Returns to microcredit, cash grants and training for male and female microentrepreneurs in Uganda (2018, background): “Fischer (2013), Augsburg et al. (2015), Gine and Mansuri (2011), Desai, Johnson, and Tarozzi (2013) and Angelucci, Karlan, and Zinman (2013) all fail to find significant impacts from microcredit.”
What are We Learning from Business Training and Entrepreneurship Evaluations Around the Developing World? (2012, background): “Finally, there is substantial heterogeneity in the education levels of participants, with averages as low as 2.5 years of schooling for females and 5.7 years for males in the study of rural Pakistan by Giné and Mansuri (2011) and as high as university level in the study by Premand et al. (2012).”
Strengthening access to finance for women-owned SMEs in developing countries (2015, background): “81 Ellis et.al., 2007 82 IFC, 2010 83 Karlan and valdivia (2011); bruhn and Zia, 2011); Mansuri and Gine, 2011; Drexler, Fischer and Schoar, 2010 84 Some business training, for example, shows an impact on the growth of firms, though not on entry or survival (bruhn and Zia, 20011).”
Entrepreneurship Programs in Developing Countries: A Meta Regression Analysis (2013, background): “3 Outcomes of interest range from labor market performance such as employment, business creation, hours of work, earnings, and profits and business performance to supply side changes such as improved technical and non-cognitive skills, business knowledge and practice, attitudes, aspirations, and mor”
Do Interventions Targeted at Micro-Entrepreneurs and Small and Medium-Sized Firms Create Jobs? A Systematic Review of the Evidence for Low and Middle Income Countries (2014, background): “In a variant of that intervention employees received special skill training. yes Argentina (urban) Micro no RCT 18 months BC: positive Giné and Mansuri (2011) Hands-on business training based on the ILO’s ’Know About Business‘ modules was added to microfinance.”