Market access: Connecting firms and entrepreneurs to markets to spur business and job growth

Original source

Ying Gao

Market access: Connecting firms and entrepreneurs to markets to spur business and job growth (2024)

secondary policy synthesis · J-PAL Policy Insights

Permission for School’s use is unestablished.

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Bureaucratic Implementation Capacity in Export Promotion

"While opening a new export office in a given country usually increased Korean firms' exports for many years, thus helping the country's manufacturing firms grow, there was no positive effect when less-skilled officials were in charge."

Demand-Side Market Access Primacy

"However, these interventions have had modest effects on firm growth and job creation. This suggests that firms face constraints on the demand side, that is, lacking buyers of their goods and services, which limit growth."

Digital Marketplace Intermediation Limits

"While randomized evaluations of transport infrastructure are uncommon, three recent evaluations of digital markets suggest that access to digital marketplaces had limited benefits for small firms on the platform in terms of revenue, profits, or workers' income."

Global E-Commerce Quality Signaling

"For example, improving small T-shirt exporters' visibility and how they signal product quality to potential buyers on a global e-commerce platform helped the firms to grow sales."

Export Sector Female Labor Empowerment

"In a quasi-experimental study in Myanmar, exporting also increased female empowerment as more jobs became available for women and domestic violence dropped in nearby communities."

Female-Only SME Export Consortia

"Female entrepreneurs are also more likely to lack business contacts-creating peer networks allowed them to expand business networks in Ghana and Tunisia."

Formal Procurement Bidding and Marketing Skills Training

"Three years later, a quarter of these firms were more likely to be operating and employing slightly more workers."

Horizontal Peer Business Networks

"Connecting firms in the same geographic markets with their peers (horizontal links) can similarly improve business performance by allowing firms to gain useful information and contacts from each other and team up for new business collaborations."

Joint Buyer-Supplier Value Chain Training

"After the training, the producers who were trained together with exporting firms were more likely to have contract-based sales, which tend to have higher prices, and were more likely to use the improved practices."

Learning-by-Exporting Quality Upgrading

"In Egypt, offering small rug makers a chance to export rugs to clients in the United States and Europe increased firms' profits by 16-26 percent."

Multinational Labor Safety Enforcement

"In Bangladesh, multinational firms helped enforce laws and improved worker safety at local supplier firms. In this case, multinational buyers formed an alliance to encourage the implementation of legally required workplace safety committees in supplier factories."

Multinational Supply Chain Linkage

"In Costa Rica, a quasi-experimental study found that after SMEs began supplying to multinational corporations, they were likely to employ more workers, sell more to other firms, and achieve higher productivity four years later."

Outsourced Marketing Professionalization

"In Nigeria, helping firms hire or outsource skilled marketing professionals also improved their marketing practices, and it was cheaper than providing business consulting."

Production Capacity Export Readiness Thresholds

"Only larger firms in the Vietnam example exported more afterward, suggesting that even though smaller firms had access to the same information through the training, they did not have enough production capacity or product quality to start exporting."

Public Procurement Integrity Perception Building

"How well firms trust the government also matters: in Uganda, improving firms' perceptions about government corruption led firms to bid on and win more government tenders."