Urbanization and Agglomeration Benefits : Gender Differentiated Impacts on Enterprise Creation in India's Informal Sector
This paper presents an exploration at the intersection of four important themes in the current development discourse: urbanization, agglomeration benefits, gender and informality. Focusing on the important policy objective of new enterprise creatio...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English en_US |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, D.C.
2013
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2013/08/18066755/urbanization-agglomeration-benefits-gender-differentiated-impacts-enterprise-creation-indias-informal-sector http://hdl.handle.net/10986/15918 |
| Summary: | This paper presents an exploration at
the intersection of four important themes in the current
development discourse: urbanization, agglomeration benefits,
gender and informality. Focusing on the important policy
objective of new enterprise creation in the informal sector,
it asks and answers four specific questions on the impact of
urbanization and gender. It finds that (i) the effect of
market access to inputs, on creation of new enterprises in
the informal sector, is greater in more urbanized areas;
(ii) This "urbanization gradient" also exists
separately for the creation of female owned enterprises and
male owned enterprises; (iii) there is a differential impact
of female specific market access compared to male specific
market access, on female owned enterprise creation in the
informal sector ; and (iv) gender specific market access to
inputs matters equally in more or less urbanized areas.
Among the policy implications of these findings are that (i)
new enterprise creation by females can be encouraged by
urbanization, but (ii) the effect can be stronger by
improving female specific market access, especially to
inputs. The analysis in this paper opens up a rich research
agenda, including further investigation of the nature of
input based versus output based perspectives on
agglomeration benefits, and exploration of policy
instruments that can improve female specific market access,
which is shown to increase female owned enterprise creation. |
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