Basic Entrepreneurship: A Means for Transforming the Economic Lives of the Poor?

世界上最贫穷的人通常既缺乏资本，也缺乏技能。他们倾向于从事农业劳动或自给自足种植等职业，这些职业往往缺乏保障和季节性，不需要资本或技能。相比之下，非穷人倾向于从事有保障的有工资的工作或经营自己的企业。因此，大多数反贫困计划试图以穷人为目标，帮助他们克服缺乏资金和/或技能的问题。这些值得注意的政策干预措施包括资本方面的小额信贷计划，或技能方面的职业培训和成人教育。然而，目前还不确定这些项目中的许多项目是否真的能够改变穷人的职业选择，从而使他们能够永久摆脱贫困。职业变化是发展和增长的核心，但它是个人、市场和国家之间一系列复杂互动的结果，因此很难可信地将职业变化与缺乏资本和技能联系起来。这项拟议的研究考察了一套新的干预措施，该干预措施由世界上最大的非政府组织孟加拉国农村合作与发展委员会首创，同时解决资本和技能限制，试图鼓励世界上最贫穷的女性改变职业。我们在孟加拉国、巴基斯坦和印度对这类项目进行了随机对照试验，以考察提供资金和技能是否能够鼓励基本创业。眼下的问题是，人们能否从两个都不是的贫穷女性身上培养出成功的女性企业家--她们获得了技能并利用了生产性资本。这个问题的关键在于，资产和技能转让能否促使穷人改变职业选择并永久摆脱贫困，而不是简单地使他们能够在短期内增加消费。这些问题非常突出，因为世界上充斥着反贫困计划的例子，尽管它们的意图是好的，但未能对预期的受益者产生任何明显的影响。因此，拟议的研究直接涉及2012-13年ESRC-DFID扶贫研究联合基金提出的第一个首要问题，即寻找有效手段，使最贫穷的人能够退出和保持脱贫。它还直接涉及结构性不平等(特别是在性别方面)以及衡量和衡量(特别是在衡量赋权以及该方案引起的社会动态和一般均衡影响方面)的交叉问题。我们审查的干预措施从根本上讲是关于在社会和经济上增强农村社区中最贫穷妇女的能力，使她们能够退出和保持脱贫。拟议的研究首先对特困计划进行大规模随机评估，该评估由首席调查员Robin Burgess教授和世界上最大的非政府组织BRAC联合进行(Bandiera等人，2012年)。然后，它扩展到受这个BRAC旗舰项目启发的两个更大的随机评估。对一个畜牧业和小额信贷项目的随机评估，该项目由BRAC在乌干达农村地区实施。以及对巴基斯坦旁遮普政府正在实施的旁遮普经济机会方案的评估，该方案试图通过向贫困的农村居民提供牲畜资产和补充培训，使他们能够创办小型畜牧业。因此，这项研究将告诉我们，由孟加拉的BRAC开创的基本创业理念是否可以在其他地方复制。

The world's poorest people typically lack both capital and skills. They tend to work as in occupations such as agricultural labor or subsistence cultivation which are often insecure and seasonal in nature and which do not require capital or skills. The non-poor, in contrast, tend to be engaged in secure wage employment or to operate their own businesses. Consequently, most anti-poverty programs attempt to target the poor to help them overcome either a lack of capital and or skills. Notable policy interventions along these lines include microfinance programs on the capital side, or vocational training and adult education on the skills side. Yet it is uncertain whether many of these programs are, in fact, able to transform the occupational choices of the poor, and thereby enable them to permanently exit poverty. Occupational change is central to development and growth, but it is the result of a complex set of interactions between individuals, markets and the state, and it is therefore difficult to credibly link occupational change to a lack of capital and skills.The proposed research examines a new set of interventions, pioneered by the world's largest NGO BRAC in Bangladesh, which simultaneously tackle the capital and skills constraint in an attempt to encourage occupational change amongst the world's poorest women. We use randomised control trials of this type of program in Bangladesh, Pakistan and India to look at whether providing capital and skills can encourage basic entrepreneurship. The issue at hand is whether one can create successful female entrepreneurs - who acquire skills and make use of productive capital - out of poor women who started out with neither. Key to this question is whether asset and skill transfers can induce the poor to alter their occupational choices and permanently exit poverty, as opposed to simply enabling them to increase their consumption in the short term. These questions are highly salient as the world is littered with examples of anti-poverty programs, which despite their best intentions, fail to have any appreciable impact on their intended beneficiaries. The proposed research thus speaks directly to the first overarching question posed in the ESRC-DFID Joint Fund for Poverty Alleviation Research 2012-13 on finding effective means to allow the poorest to exit and stay out of poverty. It also addresses directly the crosscutting issues on structural inequalities (particularly as regards gender) and measurement and metrics (particularly as regards measuring empowerment and the social dynamics and general equilibrium effects induced by the program). The interventions we examine are fundamentally about empowering the poorest women within rural communities both socially and economically so that they can exit and stay out of poverty. The proposed research begins with an on-going large randomized evaluation of the ultra poor program which is being carried out jointly by the Principal Investigator, Professor Robin Burgess, and the world's largest NGO, BRAC (Bandiera et al, 2012). It then extends to two further large randomized evaluations inspired by this BRAC flagship program. A randomized evaluation of a combined livestock and microfinance program which is being implemented by BRAC in rural Uganda. And an evaluation of the Punjab Economic Opportunities Program, being implemented by the Government of Punjab in Pakistan, which attempts to enable poor, rural inhabitants to start small livestock businesses by providing them with livestock assets and complementary training. The research will thus tell us something about whether the basic entrepreneurship idea, which was pioneered by BRAC in Bangladesh, can be replicated elsewhere.