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.

Doing business in the "worst" state of Nigeria

Last month I had the opportunity to visit Ogun State in Nigeria and to look at how the Ogun State Government approaches the business sector. It’s a pretty bleak picture, but there are signs of change and there are many state commissioners and senior civil servants who are promoting

The enabling city: places of social innovation

“Social innovation thrives on the ideas and efforts of social entrepreneurs and creative individuals whose socially conscious work contributes to environmentalism in a variety of ways”, writes Chiara Camponeschi in her 2010 e-book, The Enabling City; Place-Based Creative Problem-Solving and the Power of the Everyday. Here, the sources of innovation

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 Amsterdam

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 rapidly.

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 are once again beginning

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 working