Does gender matter for firm performance ? evidence from Eastern Europe and Central Asia

Shwetlena Sabarwal and Katherine Terrell

No 4705, Policy Research Working Paper Series from The World Bank

Abstract: 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.

Keywords: Access to Finance; Banks&Banking Reform; Gender and Health; Gender and Law (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2008-09-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eff, nep-ent, nep-lab and nep-tra
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (41)

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Related works:
Working Paper: Does Gender Matter for Firm Performance? Evidence from Eastern Europe and Central Asia (2016)
Working Paper: Does Gender Matter for Firm Performance? Evidence from Eastern Europe and Central Asia (2008)
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