Heterogeneity in entrepreneurship in developing countries: Risk,credit, and migration and the entrepreneurial propensity of youth and women

Promoting youth and female entrepreneurship is crucial to inclusive growth and the future economic and social prospects of developing countries. Evidence tends to suggest that young and female entrepreneurs are in a minority, and the extent and generating mechanisms of this outcome tend to be country‐specific. This collection of papers brings together recent empirical contributions exploring key drivers of this heterogeneity entrepreneurial propensity of youth and female in the context of a group of countries in Africa, Latin America, and the Middle East, paying special attention to the role of and issues relating to access to credit, attitudes to risk, and migratory status. A common thread in all the papers is the effective role of risk, uncertainty, and asymmetric information in the determination of entrepreneurship and in the demand for and allocation of credit when potential entrepreneurs are from specific groups, that is, women, indigenous women, women and youth in conflict and post‐conflict situations, and migrant youth. Based on these results, the papers explore various challenges in the implementation of public policies designed to promote entrepreneurship within these specific segments of the population.     

Does Ignoring Heterogeneity in Impacts Distort Project Appraisals? An Experiment for Irrigation in Vietnam

Could the simplifying assumptions made in project appraisalbe so far from the truth that the expected benefits of publicinvestments are not realized? Using data for Vietnam, commonlyused estimates of the benefits from irrigation investments basedon means are compared with impacts assessed through an econometricmodeling of marginal returns that allows for household and areaheterogeneity using integrated household-level survey data.The simpler method performs well in estimating average benefitsnationally but can be misleading for some regions, and, by ignoringheterogeneity, it overestimates gains to the poor and underestimatesgains to the rich. At moderate to high cost levels, ignoringheterogeneity in impacts results in enough mistakes to eliminatethe net benefits from public investment. When irrigating aslittle as 3 percent of Vietnam's nonirrigated land, the savingsfrom the more data-intensive method are sufficient to coverthe full cost of the extra data required, ignoring other benefitsfrom that data.