Small and Medium EnterprisesNews & Blogs

Writing in Bloomberg, economist Noah Smith points to research on how consulting services have helped small and medium enterprises grow, including an IPA study in Mexico which found it boosted productivity and hiring.

Fin24 highlights the complications of providing payments, jobs, and training as a means to help people escape poverty, citing an IPA study in Ethiopia. The study provided young, mostly female, low-skilled job-seekers with either cash-grants or factory jobs. While the intervention had short term effects after one year, they faded after five years.

Soumaya Keynes of The Economist and Chad P. Bown of the Petersen Institute for International Economics speak with Colombia University Business School professor Amit Khandelwal on research through IPA’s Small and Medium Enterprises initiative on export markets. He explains that trade can be difficult to randomize and explains how they managed to do it for Egyptian carpet manufacturers to see how firms evolve to meet new demand. Read more about the study here.

In December, IPA Bangladesh and the Access to Information (a2i) Program of the Prime Minister's Office co-hosted an Evidence Dialogue on SME Development in Bangladesh. The event was widely covered by the Bangladesh media. The Daily Sun summarized the discussions at the event:

The speakers noted that effective research on SME development can play a vital role in Bangladesh's economic development and poverty alleviation. Expansion of SMEs would contribute to Bangladesh's efforts to become a middle-income country by 2021 through creating new jobs, they observed.

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IPA researchers Jonathan Morduch and Christopher Woodruff discuss their study results on mobile financial services and obstacles to hiring female garment workers to supervisory roles in Bangladesh.

Chris Blattman and Stefan Dercon wrote an op-ed in The New York Times about the unexpected results from a study we worked on with them in Ethiopia. Together, we tested the conventional wisdom about how factory jobs help bring workers out of poverty, but as they explain: “Little did we anticipate that everything we believed would turn out to be wrong.”