کسب و کار هیچ کس فقط من: خود اشتغالی و سرمایه گذاری کوچک در توسعه اقتصادی

In most poor countries, small firms and self-employment are the dominant forms of business enterprise—even in the manufacturing sector. For rich countries, in contrast, self-employed people account for very small shares of manufacturing employment and output. This paper builds on Lucas [1978. On the size distribution of business firms. Bell Journal of Economics 9(2), 508–523] to ask whether structural changes of this kind are driven by productivity differences. A model, calibrated to Japanese time-series data, is shown to mimic key features of cross-country and time-series data. The results support the idea that changes in aggregate productivity account for much of the cross-country variation in establishment size and self-employment rates.

Small businesses dominate the economic life of most developing countries. In Accra and Agra, Dhaka and Dakar, family firms and the self-employed account for the bulk of production and employment. This is true not only in agriculture and the service sector, but also in manufacturing. From cramped workshops and backyard foundries emerges an astonishing array of manufactured goods: clothing, footwear, pottery, metal products, processed foods, cement blocks, to name a few. In Ghana, as an illustration, more than 75 percent of the manufacturing workforce reports being self-employed, and fewer than 15 percent of manufacturing workers are employed in establishments with more than 10 workers (Republic of Ghana, 1987 and Republic of Ghana, 1991).

Previous theories of development have largely abstracted from questions of establishment size, despite substantial evidence that average establishment size—and particularly the level of self-employment—changes dramatically as economies grow. This paper suggests that a model with explicit treatment of establishment size and self-employment can reproduce a number of disparate features of the data. Not only can such a model mimic the data on entrepreneur–workforce ratios across a wide range of countries, but the model also performs well in explaining cross-country observations of factor shares and other national income accounting statistics.