Gender and Rural Non-Farm Entrepreneurship

SummaryUsing matched household-enterprise-community datasets from Bangladesh, Ethiopia, Indonesia and Sri Lanka, this paper analyzes gender differences in rural non-farm entrepreneurship. With the exception of Ethiopia, women are less likely to be non-farm entrepreneurs than men are. Women’s non-farm entrepreneurship is neither strongly correlated with household composition nor with educational attainment. Female firms are smaller and less productive in all countries except Indonesia. Differences in output per worker are overwhelmingly accounted for by sorting by sector and size. They are not due to differences in capital intensity, increasing returns to scale, human capital, or local investment climate characteristics.