What Have We Learned from a Decade of Manufacturing Enterprise Surveys in Africa?

By A. Bigsten, Måns Söderbom. 2005

232 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In the early 1990s the World Bank launched the Regional Program on Enterprise Development in several African countries, a key component of which was the collection of manufacturing firm-level data. In this paper the authors review the research based on the data sets generated by these and subsequent firm surveys in Africa, with a special view to what they think are the most important policy implications. The authors survey the research on the African business environment, focusing on market size, risk, access to credit, labor, and infrastructure. They cover the research on how firms choose to organize themselves and how firms do business. They review the research on firm performance, including firm growth, investment and technology acquisition, and exports. They conclude with an extended discussion of the policy lessons.

Subfields: Accounting, Economics and Econometrics, Management of Technology and Innovation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/09e310b81052575bdd06a952b1c49f6cee3ecfa1

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Citations in the corpus

African Economic Outlook 2012 (2012, background): “(Bigsten and Söderbom 2005) Skills required for business activities are usually gained outside formal education, therefore training opportunities and access to informal networks are another advantage: working in the informal sector may be the only chance of accumulating experience or even of…”
Firm Productivity and Exports: Evidence from Ethiopian Manufacturing (2009, background): “Trade liberalisation was accompanied by financial market liberalisation and a large devaluation of the currency (Birr).”
Drivers of Entrepreneurship and Post-Entry Performance of Newborn Firms in Developing Countries (2014, unknown): “9 Consistent econometric outcomes in studies devoted to the DCs can also be found in Mead and Liedholm (1998); Gunning and Mengistae (2001); Bigsten and Söderbom (2006); Coad and Tamvada (2012).”
High-growth entrepreneurial firms in Africa: a quantile regression approach (2010, background): “Bigsten and Söderbom (2006) acknowledge that the poorly developed transport infrastructure and unavailability of efficient transport are among the main reasons for the prevalence of small manufacturing firms in Africa, as it creates small pockets of demand that generate small-scale localized produce”
Regional determinants of entrepreneurial start-ups in a developing country (2008, background): “Much work in developing countries have focused on how structural characteristics of the environment or personal attributes of firm owners and/or managers influence the expansion, investment and internationalization decisions of existing firms (Bigsten and Soderbom 2005 ).”