The analysis of constraints developed in the previous section indicates that, although there are cases in which women are more likely to identify certain obstacles as “major” or “very severe,” men’s and women’s perceptions tend to be in agreement more often than we might have expected. Even if perceptions of constraints are frequently similar for men and women, it is important to ask whether some constraints affect the performance of female-owned enterprises more than they affect the performance of male-owned enterprises.
In what follows, two indicators of performance have been analyzed: value-added per worker and total factor productivity (TFP).15 A priori, differences between female- and male-owned enterprises may be expected, due, for example, to women facing greater difficulties than male entrepreneurs in managing their enterprises.
Or, conversely, differences may be due to women entrepreneurs being a very selected sample, because they had to face greater obstacles than men to start their businesses in the first place.
The value-added per worker is very similar for men and women, as Figure 4 illustrates.This analysis disaggregates the results presented in Chapter 1.2 by sex of the owner of the enterprise. Only in three countries (Tanzania, in favor of women; Namibia and Botswana, in favor of men) is there a statistically significant difference between the median of the value-added per worker of the two groups of entrepreneurs.
Women entrepreneurs are also fairly equally distributed across quintiles of TFP—see Figure 5.16Women are not overrepresented at the top of the distribution of TFP, nor are they overrepresented at the bottom.
These results suggest that, once men and women entrepreneurs are in business (and survive in business), they face on average the same conditions, and their enterprises display very similar levels of value-added per worker and TFP. It may be that, if selection of women into entrepreneurship is tougher than for men, higher unobservable characteristics of women compensate for higher obstacles that they may be facing as women, but the net result is essentially one of no difference in productivity.
The positive message, therefore, is that in Africa women’s enterprises can be just as productive as men’s.
What about the impact of business constraints on firm productivity? Even in this case there is no evidence of the performance of female-owned enterprises being disproportionately negatively affected.
Figure 6 shows the relationship between median value-added per worker (by sex of the business owner) and the severity of two constraints that are generally identified as gender-adverse:
corruption (measured by the percentage of entrepreneurs forced to pay bribes to obtain a service or a license, Figure 6a) and access to finance (measured by the average percentage of working capital financed by “formal”
sources—from local or foreign commercial banks, leasing arrangements, investment funds, trade credit, credit cards, Figure 6b—and by all types of external sources, including informal networks, Figure 6c). In this case, the chosen constraints are more “objective” than the perceptions of entrepreneurs about the severity of an obstacle, analyzed in the previous section.
The negative relationship between corruption and productivity highlighted in Chapter 1.2 exists for both men and women entrepreneurs. However, according to the Enterprise Survey data, the productivity of femaleowned businesses does not appear to be affected more than the productivity of male-owned businesses.17 The same holds for access to finance, measured as the average percentage of working capital from formal sources.
Similarly, across countries, a larger share of working capital derived from external sources (that is, from formal sources as well as informal channels such as family, friends, money lenders, but excluding internal funds and sale of stock) is associated with higher productivity, but the same relationship exists for men and women alike.
These findings are confirmed even after controlling for the firm’s characteristics (size, sector, location, and whether the firm exports or not).
Except in a few cases, the performance of female-owned enterprises is not disproportionately affected by the severity of the constraints.
18 In other words, once they are over the entry threshold and are operating businesses, both men and women entrepreneurs in this sample are by and large affected by these constraints in the same way.
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