Small Firm Death in Developing Countries

David McKenzie and Anna Luisa Paffhausen

No 12401, CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers

Abstract: Small firms are an important source of income for the poor in developing countries, and the target of many interventions designed to help them grow. But there is no systematic information on the failure or death of such firms. We put together 16 panel surveys from 12 different developing countries to develop stylized facts from over 14,000 firms on how much firm death there is; on which types of these firms are most likely to die; and on why they die, paying careful attention to issues of measurement and attrition. We find small firms die at an average rate of 8.3 percent per year over the first five years of following them, so that half of all firms observed to be operating at a given point in time are dead within 6 years. Death rates are higher for small firms in richer countries, younger firms, retail firms, less productive and less profitable firms, and those whose owners are female and not middle-aged. We propose three theories of why small firms die: firm competition and firm shocks, occupational choice, and non-separability from the household. We find the cause of firm death to be heterogeneous, with different subgroups of firms more likely to die for reasons consistent with each of these theories.

Keywords: Firm death; Survival; Microenterprise dynamics (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D22 L26 O12 O17 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2017-10
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-bec and nep-sbm
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (7)

Downloads: (external link)
https://cepr.org/publications/DP12401 (application/pdf)
CEPR Discussion Papers are free to download for our researchers, subscribers and members. If you fall into one of these categories but have trouble downloading our papers, please contact us at subscribers@cepr.org

Related works:
Journal Article: Small Firm Death in Developing Countries (2019)
Working Paper: Small firm death in developing countries (2017)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cpr:ceprdp:12401

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
https://cepr.org/publications/DP12401

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CEPR Discussion Papers from C.E.P.R. Discussion Papers Centre for Economic Policy Research, 33 Great Sutton Street, London EC1V 0DX.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().