How Can We Learn Whether Firm Policies are Working in Africa? : Challenges (and Solutions?) for Experiments and Structural Models / David McKenzie
Resource type: Ressourcentyp: Buch (Online)Book (Online)Language: English Publisher: Washington, D.C : The World Bank, 2011Description: Online-Ressource (26 p)Additional physical formats: McKenzie, David: How Can We Learn Whether Firm Policies are Working in Africa? DOI: DOI: 10.1596/1813-9450-5632Online resources: Summary: Firm productivity is low in African countries, prompting governments to try a number of active policies to improve it. Yet despite the millions of dollars spent on these policies, we are far from a situation where we know whether many of them are yielding the desired payoffs. This paper establishes some basic facts about the number and heterogeneity of firms in different sub-Saharan African countries and discusses their implications for experimental and structural approaches towards trying to estimate firm policy impacts. It shows that the typical firm program such as a matching grant scheme or business training program involves only 100 to 300 firms, which are often very heterogeneous in terms of employment and sales levels. As a result, standard experimental designs will lack any power to detect reasonable sized treatment impacts, while structural models which assume common production technologies and few missing markets will be ill-suited to capture the key constraints firms face. Nevertheless, the author suggests a way forward which involves focusing on a more homogeneous sub-sample of firms and collecting a lot more data on them than is typically collectedPPN: PPN: 834970120Package identifier: Produktsigel: ZDB-1-WBA | ZDB-110-WBLNo physical items for this record
Reproduktion, 2011. (World Bank eLibrary) |2011||||||||||