Does Gender Matter for Firm Performance? Evidence from Eastern Europe and Central Asia
Using 2005 firm level data for 26 countries in Eastern and Central Europe, this paper estimates performance gaps between male and female-owned businesses, while controlling for location by industry and country. The findings show that female entrepr...
| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Policy Research Working Paper |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
World Bank, Washington, DC
2012
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/2008/09/9813792/gender-matter-firm-performance-evidence-eastern-europe-central-asia http://hdl.handle.net/10986/6783 |
| Summary: | Using 2005 firm level data for 26
countries in Eastern and Central Europe, this paper
estimates performance gaps between male and female-owned
businesses, while controlling for location by industry and
country. The findings show that female entrepreneurs have a
significantly smaller scale of operations (as measured by
sales revenues) and are less efficient in terms of total
factor productivity, although the difference is small.
However, women entrepreneurs generate the same amount of
profit per unit of revenue as men. Although both male and
female entrepreneurs in the region are sub-optimally small,
women's returns to scale are significantly larger than
men's, implying that women would gain more from
increasing their scale. The authors argue that the main
reasons for the sub-optimal size of female-owned firms are
that they are both capital constrained and concentrated in
industries with small firms. |
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