IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/ids/ijesbu/v19y2013i4p438-470.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

On informality and productivity of micro and small enterprises: evidence from MENA countries

Author

Listed:
  • Rana Hendy
  • Chahir Zaki

Abstract

The objective of this paper is twofold. First, it aims to examine the impact of informality on productivity in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) in order to identify existing barriers to formality. Second, it pinpoints factors that boost productivity of micro and small enterprises (MSEs). Using firm-level micro data from the Egyptian and Turkish MSEs surveys, we first find that firm's age, entrepreneur's gender, age and education have a significant impact on the probability of belonging to the informal sector. In addition, we find a negative effect of informality on productivity in both Egypt and Turkey. While this result is sensitive to the estimation method for the Egyptian case, it remains robust for the Turkish one. Consequently, there is a clear and significant productivity differential between formal and informal firms in Turkey, but not in Egypt.

Suggested Citation

  • Rana Hendy & Chahir Zaki, 2013. "On informality and productivity of micro and small enterprises: evidence from MENA countries," International Journal of Entrepreneurship and Small Business, Inderscience Enterprises Ltd, vol. 19(4), pages 438-470.
  • Handle: RePEc:ids:ijesbu:v:19:y:2013:i:4:p:438-470
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://www.inderscience.com/link.php?id=55486
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    Citations

    Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.
    as


    Cited by:

    1. Fatma El-Hamidi & Cem Baslevent, 2013. "Micro and Small Enterprises (MSEs) in Urban Economies: A Comparative Study of Egypt and Turkey at the Province Level," Working Papers 761, Economic Research Forum, revised Jun 2013.
    2. Abeer Elshennawy & Dirk Willenbockel, 2014. "Trade Liberalization and the Costs and Benefits of Informality an Intertemporal General Equilibrium Model for Egypt," Working Papers 888, Economic Research Forum, revised Dec 2014.
    3. Antonio Báez-Morales, 2015. "“Differences in efficiency between Formal and Informal Micro Firms in Mexico”," IREA Working Papers 201516, University of Barcelona, Research Institute of Applied Economics, revised Jun 2015.
    4. Tansel, Aysit & Ozdemir, Zeynel / A., 2014. "Determinants of Transitions across Formal/Informal sectors in Egypt," MPRA Paper 61183, University Library of Munich, Germany.
    5. Seamus Murphy & Diksha Arora & Froukje Kruijssen & Cynthia McDougall & Paula Kantor, 2020. "Gender-based market constraints to informal fish retailing: Evidence from analysis of variance and linear regression," PLOS ONE, Public Library of Science, vol. 15(3), pages 1-16, March.
    6. Eunice Maria M. N. Dos Santos & João J. Ferreira, 2017. "Analyzing Informal Entrepreneurship: A Bibliometric Survey," Journal of Developmental Entrepreneurship (JDE), World Scientific Publishing Co. Pte. Ltd., vol. 22(04), pages 1-20, December.
    7. Ali Rashed & Maia Sieverding, 2014. "Micro and Small Household Enterprises in Egypt: Potential for Growth and Employment Generation," Working Papers 831, Economic Research Forum, revised May 2014.
    8. Nesma Ali & Boris Najman, 2016. "Informal Competition, Firms Productivity and Policy Reforms in Egypt," Working Papers 1025, Economic Research Forum, revised Jul 2016.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ids:ijesbu:v:19:y:2013:i:4:p:438-470. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sarah Parker (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.inderscience.com/browse/index.php?journalID=74 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.