Results and Impact Blog

Currently there are more than 30 million unemployed in India. This puts job creation high on the government’s agenda. We think the manufacturing sector, rather than the agricultural or services sectors, can provide the answer to this challenge.

Agriculture, a traditional source of jobs in India, employs about half of our workforce, but its viability is constrained by declining profits, and the low penetration of sophisticated farming techniques. In fact, over the past decade, services have been the main engine of job creation in India. However, this sector already contributes to more than half of national GDP, and it employs 25 percent of the labor force. In contrast, industrial firms employ only 11 percent of India’s workers. This implies that there is room for growth in the ma... Read More

Recently, I was pleasantly surprised to find out that I had won the global essay competition about youth unemployment which was co-sponsored by IFC and the World Economic Forum. As the CEO of a small and growing company, the prize money and the opportunity to attend the World Economic Forum meeting in Istanbul were very welcome. More valuable for me, however, was the opportunity to lend my voice to what I believe is the defining debate of our generation.

If you ask any person of my generation today what they are most concerned about, I can almost guarantee that the answer will be finding a job or setting up a business to support themselves and their family. According to the ILO nearly a quarter of the world’s youth, who are mostly in developing countries, are unemployed. How c... Read More

A growing share of global production takes place in the form of integrated value chains. This does not only concern global multinationals. For developing countries it is also a key development strategy to involve their companies in efficient global supply chains in order to stay competitive and to secure and create jobs. Today, global supply chains require an increasing set of international standards that companies need to comply with. In those cases, “good jobs” are created or rather secured. And good jobs lead to poverty reduction.

DEG (Deutsche Investitions- und Entwicklungsgesellschaft), a German DFI, has supported partner companies for 50 years in emerging and developing countries along the value chain to comply with high social and environmental standards. DEG understands t... Read More

Considerable effort and attention have been devoted to assessing the critical role of small and medium enterprises (SMEs) in economic development. Thanks to such work, there is extensive evidence showing that SMEs are an important source of employment growth. But against this backdrop, not enough attention has been paid to the importance of small firms, namely firms with 5-19 workers in this context.

Thanks to Enterprise Surveys data of 46,556 enterprises in 106 developing countries, we learn that small businesses constitute a major force and are the primary engine of employment growth in developing economies.

First, small firms show the highest employment growth of 18.6 percent vs. 8.1 percent of medium-size firms (20-99 workers) and -1.0 percent of large firms (100+ w... Read More