Is Small Beautiful? Small Enterprise, Aid and Employment in Africa
By J. Page, Måns Söderbom. 2015
181 citations recorded by the source corpus.
type="main" xml:lang="en"> Aid providers often describe small firms as ‘job creators’. But what types of jobs do they create? Drawing on enterprise survey data for nine African countries and panel data for Ethiopia we find that small and large formal sector firms create similar numbers of net jobs. Small firms, however, have much higher turnover of employment and pay persistently lower wages. To create more ‘good’ jobs aid should target the constraints to the growth of firms of all sizes. Improving the ‘investment climate’ and new programs to increase firms' capabilities—through, for example, management training—offer greater prospects for employment creation.
Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Management of Technology and Innovation
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1a33cf7f825e0b6af89cb85c31075cbcc8d006f8
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Citations in the corpus
- Bank Financing for SMEs – Lessons from the Literature (2013, unknown): “Page and Sonderbom (2012) find a similar job net creation by small and large firms for a long panel data series for Ethiopia.”
- Foreign Aid and Inclusive Development: Updated Evidence from Africa, 2005-2012 (2017, unknown): “…the MDG-related poverty trends by suggesting mechanisms by which foreign aid could be tailored to achieve more employment, inclusive growth and poverty alleviation (Jones & Tarp, 2015; Simpasa et al., 2015; Jones et al., 2015; Asongu & Tchamyou, 2015; Page & Shimeles, 2015; Page & Söderbom, 2015).”
- The Role of ICT in Modulating the Effect of Education and Lifelong Learning on Income Inequality and Economic Growth in Africa (2019, unknown): “…inter alia : the imperative to reinvent development assistance in order to promote inclusive economic development (Jones & Tarp, 2015; Asongu, 2016; Page & Söderbom, 2015); the connection between the distribution of income and external flows (Kaulihowa & Adjasi, 2018); nexuses between income and…”
- Do entrepreneurs always benefit from business failure experience? (2018, background): “literature because although small business start-ups account for nearly 70% of employment globally and 90% in the developing world (Page and Söderbom, 2015), the failure rate among start-ups currently stands at an alarming rate of approximately 90% (Patel, 2015), indicating an urgent need to better ”
- Is fin-tech the new panacea for poverty alleviation and local development? Contesting Suri and Jack’s M-Pesa findings published in Science (2019, unknown): “Indeed, high rates of displacement broadly define the situation in much of Africa (see Page and Söderbom 2012), and Kenya is very unlikely to be an exception to this rule, as pointed out by Viswanath (2018).”