Small companies in poor countries
By The Economist
From The Economist
Published: October 12, 2012
Can the spirit of enterprise be taught?
Oct 6th 2012 | DHAKA | from the print edition
WORLD-BEATING companies that began in garages—think of Amazon, Apple or Google—are revered in the West. Developing countries can boast one or two examples of their own: India’s Tata and South Korea’s Samsung began life as small trading companies; Thailand’s Charoen Pokphand Group, an agri-business firm, started as a seed shop. But these are exceptions. Of the millions of small enterprises in poor countries, hardly any grow big and strong. The World Bank’s new World Development Report* looks at what can be done to help start-ups in poor countries become the next Google.
Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank, a microlender, describes the poor as “natural entrepreneurs”. If so, it is not clear what happens to them. In America, if a company lasts 35 years, it becomes on average ten times as productive and employs ten times as many people. If an Indian one lasts that long, its productivity merely doubles and its headcount actually falls (see chart). The bank’s survey of 54,000 firms in 102 developing countries finds that large firms (those with over 100 workers) have higher productivity and higher wages, are more likely to export and are more innovative than small firms (those with fewer than 20 employees). Big firms are more likely to add a new product, incorporate new technology or upgrade a product line. Small firms tend to stay small.
The result has been growing pessimism about what Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology call “reluctant entrepreneurs”—poor people who run their own businesses only because they cannot find a job. “We are kidding ourselves if we think they can pave the way for a mass exit from poverty,” they wrote last year in a book called “Poor Economics”.
The bank tries to reinstate some of Mr Yunus’s sunnier outlook. It shows that, in seven African countries, the return on capital for tiny enterprises is ten times that for the largest 20% of firms. Some small firms, at least, are doing well, not just surviving. The bank also scored the business expertise of owners and managers of other small African enterprises. The results, plotted as a graph, are a standard bell-shape: a few poor results at one end, a few excellent ones at the other and a bulge of average scores in the middle. This is not a picture of failure across the board.
The question is what can be done to improve matters. Obviously, good infrastructure and a welcoming investment climate matter. Governments have tried providing cheap loans or grants to pay the wages of an extra employee. This had no effect. Nor did giving special grants to female business owners, as happened in Ghana. But free management training did help. The trouble is that most enterprises see no point in it: asked whether lack of management expertise was a problem, only 3% of Brazilian small firms said yes.
Learning from abroad, though, makes a big difference. In 1979 Desh, a Bangladeshi garments firm, sent 130 of its staff for an eight-month course at a South Korean textile plant. At the time, Bangladesh had no textile exports and no modern industry. When the trainees got back, almost all of them set up their own firms. Today Bangladesh has 3.6m textile workers, 80% of them women, generating $13 billion of exports a year. Mr Yunus should be proud.
* World Development Report 2013. Available here
from the print edition | Business
窮國新創企業成為下一個Google？
2012-10-12 Web only 作者：經濟學人
以車庫為起點的世界級企業，在西方備受尊敬，發展中國家也有一、兩個這樣的例子，但它們是例外；窮國的數百萬小企業中，幾乎沒有一間能成長得又大又強。世界銀行在新發佈的世界發展報告中，試圖找出幫助窮國新創企業的方法，讓它們有機會成為下一個Google。
孟加拉Grameen銀行的創立者認為，窮人是天生的企業家；若真是如此，一定是哪裡出了問題。在美國，如果企業能營運35年，其生產力和雇員人數平均會成長為10倍，而營運了35年的印度公司，生產力只會增加一倍，雇員人數反而還會下降。
世界銀行調查了102個發展中國家的5.4萬間企業，結果發現，大企業的生產力和薪資通常較高，也更有機會出口、更具革新能力；大企業比較有機會推出新產品、採用新技術或升級生產線，小企業則多會繼續維持小規模。
MIT的兩位專家曾稱之為「猶豫創業者」，亦即窮人選擇創業，只是因為他們找不到工作。世界銀行則試圖強調比較樂觀的面向。
問題在於如何改善現況。許多政府試圖採行低廉貸款等措施，只是沒有什麼效果；免費的管理訓練確實有幫助，但多數企業認為那根本不重要，例如只有3%的巴西小型企業認為缺乏管理專才是個問題。
不過，向國外學習的效果非常好。1979年，孟加拉的服裝公司Desh將130名員工送至南韓紡織工廠，接受為期8個月的訓練；當時，孟加拉沒有紡織出口也沒有現代工業。這批受訓人員回國後，幾乎所有人都創立了自己的企業，現在孟加拉擁有360萬紡織勞工，年出口額高達130億美元。（黃維德譯）
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