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221013 ||| eng |
| 100 |
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|a McKenzie, David
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| 245 |
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|a How Can We Learn Whether Firm Policies are Working in Africa?
|h Elektronische Ressource
|b Challenges (and Solutions?) for Experiments and Structural Models
|c David McKenzie
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| 260 |
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|a Washington, D.C
|b The World Bank
|c 2011
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| 300 |
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|a 26 p
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| 700 |
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|a McKenzie, David
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| 041 |
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7 |
|a eng
|2 ISO 639-2
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| 989 |
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|b WOBA
|a World Bank E-Library Archive
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| 028 |
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|a 10.1596/1813-9450-5632
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| 856 |
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|u http://elibrary.worldbank.org/doi/book/10.1596/1813-9450-5632
|x Verlag
|3 Volltext
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|a 330
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| 520 |
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|a 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 collected
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