کارآفرینی دو لایه و توسعه اقتصادی

This paper argues that there are two tiers of entrepreneurship important for economic development. One is concerned with investments in productive technologies that improve productivity and better service consumer needs. The other is concerned with the creation of protective technologies that secure citizens’ private property rights vis-à-vis one another. In the developing world where governments cannot or do not protect citizens against predation, “institutional entrepreneurs” devise private mechanisms of property protection, providing the security required for productive entrepreneurship to grow. However, private protection technologies can be a double-edged sword. While private protection technologies enable some investment and exchange by securing citizens’ property where government does not, potential constraints on these technologies’ effectiveness may simultaneously limit their ability to expand investment and exchange beyond modest levels.

A growing body of research shows that the strength of the positive relationship between economic freedom and development stems largely from presence of “good” institutions in economically free countries and “poor” institutions in unfree ones.1 Most fundamental to “good” institutions are those that protect private property rights (see, for instance, Acemoglu & Johnson, 2005; Acemoglu, Johnson, & Robinson, 2001a; Acemoglu, Johnson, & Robinson, 2001b). Property protection has two components: freedom from government expropriation, which requires rulers to refrain from confiscating citizens’ property, and protection against threats of private predation posed by other citizens. Where government is well-functioning the state provides this protection through institutions such as police, courts, and the law.

Our analysis leads to several conclusions. First, economists who do not recognize both tiers of entrepreneurship considered here are likely to underestimate the true level of entrepreneurship in the developing world and misunderstand the fundamental nature of the problem connecting entrepreneurial behavior, property rights, and economic performance. This connection is as much through protective-tier entrepreneurial activity, which has typically been ignored, as it is through productive-tier entrepreneurial activity, which has typically received all the attention. We have tried to point out that crucial to small-scale investment in productive technologies in the developing world, which Bauer insightfully notes has been underestimated by the development community, is a parallel entrepreneurial activity that supports this investment by devising private protection technologies where the state is weak, absent, or neglectful. Productive-tier entrepreneurship is not possible without protective-tier entrepreneurship and the latter comprises a good deal of the entrepreneurial activity that goes on in developing countries.