Can Basic Entrepreneurship Transform the Economic Lives of the Poor?

Oriana Bandiera, Robin Burgess, Narayan Das (), Selim Gulesci (), Imran Rasul and Munshi Sulaiman ()
Additional contact information
Narayan Das: Bangladesh Rural Advancement Committee (BRAC)
Munshi Sulaiman: BRAC University

No 7386, IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA)

Abstract: The world's poorest people lack capital and skills and toil for others in occupations that others shun. Using a large-scale and long-term randomized control trial in Bangladesh this paper demonstrates that sizable transfers of assets and skills enable the poorest women to shift out of agricultural labor and into running small businesses. This shift, which persists and strengthens after assistance is withdrawn, leads to a 38% increase in earnings. Inculcating basic entrepreneurship, where severely disadvantaged women take on occupations which were the preserve of non-poor women, is shown to be a powerful means of transforming the economic lives of the poor.

Keywords: asset transfers; capital constraints; vocational training; occupational choice; structural change; poverty (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D50 I30 O12 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 55 pages
Date: 2013-05
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-dev, nep-ent, nep-ltv and nep-mfd
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (73)

Downloads: (external link)
https://docs.iza.org/dp7386.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Can Basic Entrepreneurship Transform the Economic Lives of the Poor? (2013)
Working Paper: Can basic entrepreneurship transform the economic lives of the poor? (2013)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:iza:izadps:dp7386

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
IZA, Margard Ody, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in IZA Discussion Papers from Institute of Labor Economics (IZA) IZA, P.O. Box 7240, D-53072 Bonn, Germany. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Holger Hinte ().