Place Based Economic Development with Simon White

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Business Environment Reform

Simon White | Specialist in policies and programs for more enabling business environments.

The Kafka Brigade and the "strangling and depersonalising effect of bureaucracy"

Franz Kafka wrote about the strangling and depersonalising effect of bureaucracy. The Kafka Brigade reminds us that people using services have a lot to say about improving them – if only we would listen. Kafka Brigade is an independent, non-profit action research team, comprising a network of action researchers from

51 Lessons for Donor and Development Agency Support to Business Environment Reforms

Last month, the Donor Committee for Enterprise Development (DCED) published a paper I prepared on the practice of supporting business environment reform (BER). This is a synthesis of the findings of three practice reviews that I led in Bangladesh (2011), Kenya (2010) and Rwanda (2011). The reports of these country

More developing countries participate in this year's Global Entrepreneurship Week

Good to see the list of developing countries participating in the annual Global Entrepreneurship Week growing. There are about 120 countries participating in 2011 (14-20 November). The Global Entrepreneurship Week is an initiative of the Ewing Marion Kauffman Foundation in the USA. It began in 2008 and has grown

Start-up rates begin to show signs of slowdown in most OECD countries in 2011

The OCED has released new data that indicates start-up rates of new firms fell precipitously in all OECD countries where data is available. In subsequent quarters, start-up rates began picking up, toward pre-crisis levels, but in recent quarters this momentum stalled. With few exceptions, start-up rates

Egypt's increasing informal economy

Ghada Barsoum, professor of public policy at the American University in Cairo (AUC) claims that the informal economy has become the “number one source of income in Egypt,” as a result of “the lack of opportunities in the formal economy.” Seventy-five percent of Egyptian youth, according to Barsoum, are

New guidlines on business environment reform and the informal economy

The Donor Committee for Enterprise Development (DCED) has recently published guidelines for donor and development agencies on business environment reform and the informal economy. I was the principal author of this document, which was based on a discussion paper (see below), a major conference held in Cape Town in April

Doing Business 2012

The World Bank Group’s Doing Business team have just released the annual report for this year: Doing Business 2012: Doing Business in a More Transparent World. This is the ninth in a series of annual reports comparing business regulations in 183 economies. It measures regulations affecting 11 areas of