Informal entrepreneurship in developing economies: the impacts of starting-up unregistered on firm performance

To advance understanding of the entrepreneurship process in developing economies, this paper evaluates whether registered enterprises that initially avoid the cost of registration, and focus their resources on overcoming other liabilities of newness, lay a stronger foundation for subsequent growth. Analyzing World Bank Enterprise Survey data across 127 countries, and controlling for other firm performance determinants, registered enterprises that started-up unregistered and spent longer operating unregistered are revealed to have significantly higher subsequent annual sales, employment and productivity growth rates compared with those that registered from the outset. The theoretical and policy implications are then discussed

Starting-up unregistered and firm performance in Turkey

© 2016 The Author(s) Recent years have seen a questioning of the negative representation of informal sector entrepreneurship and an emergent view that it may offer significant benefits. This paper advances this rethinking by evaluating the relationship between business registration and future firm performance. Until now, the assumption has been that starting-up unregistered is linked to weaker firm performance. Using World Bank Enterprise Survey data on 2494 formal enterprises in Turkey, and controlling for other determinants of firm performance as well as the endogeneity of the registration decision, the finding is that formal enterprises that started-up unregistered and spent longer unregistered have significantly higher subsequent annual sales and productivity growth rates compared with those registered from the outset. This is argued to be because in such weak institutional environments, the advantages of registering from the outset are outweighed by the benefits of deferring business registration and the low risks of detection and punishment. The resultant implication is that there is a need to shift away from the conventional eradication approach based on the negative depiction of informal entrepreneurship as poorly performing, and towards a more facilitating approach that improves the benefits of business registration and tackles the systemic formal institutional deficiencies that lead entrepreneurs to decide to delay the registration of their ventures

Potentialities and Limits of Some Non-thermal Technologies to Improve Sustainability of Food Processing

International audienceIn the whole food production chain, from the farm to the fork, food manufacturing steps have a large environmental impact. Despite significant efforts made to optimize heat recovery or water consumption, conventional food processing remains poorly efficient in terms of energy requirements and waste management. Therefore, in the few last decades, much research has focused on the development of alternative non-thermal technologies. Some of them, such as membrane separation processes, hydrostatic or dynamic high pressure, dense phase or high-pressure carbon dioxide, and pulsed electric fields (PEFs) have been extensively studied for cold pasteurization, concentration, extraction, or food functionalization. However, it is still difficult to evaluate the actual advantages or limits of these innovative processing technologies to replace conventional processes. Thus, the overall aim of this paper is to present an overview of the most relevant studies dealing with the potentialities and limits of these non-thermal technologies to improve sustainability of food processing. After a brief presentation of the physical principles of these technologies, the paper illustrates how these technologies could play a decisive role for sustainable food preservation or valorization of raw materials and by-products

Urban Nature: (The) Good and (The) Bad

International audience"The article discusses the evolution of the relationship between nature and the urban environment during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in Europe and the United States, a relationship which was mainly framed in terms of public health issues. From the first hygienist utopias, it examines how urban ecologies developed through the analysis of the great figures of urbanism, who are the source of urban theories and utopias. Ultimately, it explores how environments today are redesigned and standardized for health ideals enrolled in the tradition of urban planning. The article argues the following thesis: spatial and urban planning have long been the tools of biopolitics, i.e. political engagement in all dimensions of life in order to monitor, preserve and control it. Public health becomes the objective of biopolitics as the way we tried, from the eighteenth century onwards, to rationalize the problems posed to government practice by the phenomena resulting from an assembly of living beings making up a population: health, hygiene, birth, life and race relations. It was then that some key concepts were shaped (such as population), forms of knowledge (such as statistics and demography) and practices (hygiene, public safety, etc.). These notions are all linked with the development of modern urban planning conceived as a discipline. To act on the territory is to act on the population, categorised as bodies." (source éditeur