Gender and Rural Non-Farm Entrepreneurship

By Bob Rijkers, R. Costa. 2012

171 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Despite their increasing prominence in policy debates, little is known about gender inequities in non-agricultural labor market outcomes in rural areas. Using matched household-enterprise-community data sets from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, this paper documents and analyzes gender differences in the individual portfolio choice and productivity of non-farm entrepreneurship. Except for Ethiopia, women are less likely than men to become nonfarm entrepreneurs. Women's nonfarm entrepreneurship isn't strongly correlated with household composition or educational attainment, but is especially prevalent amongst women who are the head of their household. Female-led firms are much smaller and less productive on average, though gender differences in productivity vary dramatically across countries. Mean differences in log output per worker suggest that male firms are roughly 10 times as productive as female firms in Bangladesh, three times as those in Ethiopia and twice as those in Sri Lanka. By contrast, no significant differences in labor productivity were detected in Indonesia. Differences in output per worker are overwhelmingly accounted for by sorting by sector and size. They can't be explained by differences in capital intensity, human capital or the local investment climate, nor by increasing returns to scale.

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Citations in the corpus

Dynamics of off-farm employment in Sub-Saharan Africa: A gender perspective (2018, background): “However, other studies focused on West Africa have documented that rural non-farm entrepreneurship is more common among women than men (Rijkers and Costa, 2012; Ackah, 2013).”
Factors affecting the success of women’s entrepreneurship: a review of literature (2017, background): “…(2012) F10 Self-efficacy (competitiveness and risk taken) Dawson and Henley (2012), Bonte and Piegler (2013), Dalborg (2015a), Zeffane (2015) Note: Rijkers and Costa (2012) did not find evidence of the relationship between education and motivation for rural non-farm entrepreneurship – that is…”
Twenty Years of Rural Entrepreneurship: A Bibliometric Survey (2016, background): “A reasonable number of studies, such as the one by Rijkers and Costa (2012), stresses gender traits in rural entrepreneurship.”