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Article dans une revue Economica Année : 2020

Does Social Pressure Hinder Entrepreneurship in Africa? The Forced Mutual Help Hypothesis

Résumé

In the absence of a public safety net, wealthy Africans have the social obligation to share their re- sources with their needy relatives in the form of cash transfers and inefficient family hiring. We develop a model of entrepreneurial choice that accounts for this social redistributive constraint. We derive pre- dictions regarding employment choices, productivity, and profitability of firms ran by entrepreneurs of African versus non-African origin. Everything else equal, local firms are over-staffed and less productive than firms owned by nonlocals, which discourages local entrepreneurship. Using data from the manu- facturing sector, we illustrate the theory by structurally estimating the proportion of missing African entrepreneurs. Our estimates, which are suggestive due to the data limitation, vary between 8% and 12.6% of the formal sector workforce. Implications for the role of social protection are discussed.
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Dates et versions

hal-02929477, version 1 (03-09-2020)

Identifiants

  • HAL Id : hal-02929477 , version 1

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Philippe Alby, Emmanuelle Auriol, Pierre Nguimkeu. Does Social Pressure Hinder Entrepreneurship in Africa? The Forced Mutual Help Hypothesis. Economica, 2020, 87 (346), pp.299-327. ⟨hal-02929477⟩
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