Looking for a Google
寻找谷歌的影子
Can the spirit of enterprise be taught?
企业精神是可以教的吗？
WORLD-BEATING companies that began in garages—think of Amazon, Apple or Google—are revered in the West. Developing countries can boast one or two examples of their own: India’s Tata and South Korea’s Samsung began life as small trading companies; Thailand’s Charoen Pokphand Group, an agri-business firm, started as a seed shop. But these are exceptions. Of the millions of small enterprises in poor countries, hardly any grow big and strong. The World Bank’s new World Development Report* looks at what can be done to help start-ups in poor countries become the next Google.
有些世界一流的公司起初是在车库里创立的——比如亚马逊、苹果和谷歌——它们在西方受到了推崇。发展中国家在这方面也拥有一两家值得自豪的模范企业：印度的塔塔集团和韩国的三星集团诞生时都只是小型的贸易公司；泰国的农业公司正大集团创建之初也不过是一家种子商行。但这些都是个案。世界上的贫穷国家里有千千万万家小型企业，真正发展壮大的屈指可数。世界银行刚刚发布的《世界发展报告》*针对如何帮助贫穷国家的新建公司成为下一个谷歌进行了研究。
Muhammad Yunus, the founder of Bangladesh’s Grameen Bank, a microlender, describes the poor as “natural entrepreneurs”. If so, it is not clear what happens to them. In America, if a company lasts 35 years, it becomes on average ten times as productive and employs ten times as many people. If an Indian one lasts that long, its productivity merely doubles and its headcount actually falls (see chart). The bank’s survey of 54,000 firms in 102 developing countries finds that large firms (those with over 100 workers) have higher productivity and higher wages, are more likely to export and are more innovative than small firms (those with fewer than 20 employees). Big firms are more likely to add a new product, incorporate new technology or upgrade a product line. Small firms tend to stay small.
小额贷款机构孟加拉乡村银行的创始人穆罕默德•尤努斯把穷人称为“天然的创业者”。如果这种说法成立，那么这些“天然创业者”为何罕有成大业者就不得而知了。在美国，如果一家公司持续存在35年，那么平均来说它的生产效率会提高九倍，雇员数量也会增加九倍。而如果一家印度公司持续存在同样长的时间，其生产效率仅仅会提高一倍，而总员工数量会不升反降（见图表）。世界银行对102个发展中国家的54000家公司进行了调查，发现相对于那些员工不到20人的小公司而言，员工在100人以上的大公司的生产效率和工资水平都比较高，也更有可能进行出口、更富于创新性。大公司更有可能开发新产品、吸收新技术或者升级产品线。而小公司往往无法扩大规模。
The result has been growing pessimism about what Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology call “reluctant entrepreneurs”—poor people who run their own businesses only because they cannot find a job. “We are kidding ourselves if we think they can pave the way for a mass exit from poverty,” they wrote last year in a book called “Poor Economics”.
这种调查结果反映了一种日益增长的悲观情绪——麻省理工学院的阿比吉特•班纳吉和爱思特•迪弗洛称之为“无可奈何的创业者”：这些穷人之所以自己创业，仅仅是因为他们无法在别处找到工作。班纳吉和迪弗洛去年在《贫穷经济学》一书里写道：“如果认为这些穷人能够为民众大规模脱贫创造条件，我们就是在自欺欺人。”
The bank tries to reinstate some of Mr Yunus’s sunnier outlook. It shows that, in seven African countries, the return on capital for tiny enterprises is ten times that for the largest 20% of firms. Some small firms, at least, are doing well, not just surviving. The bank also scored the business expertise of owners and managers of other small African enterprises. The results, plotted as a graph, are a standard bell-shape: a few poor results at one end, a few excellent ones at the other and a bulge of average scores in the middle. This is not a picture of failure across the board.
世界银行试图重新挖掘尤努斯那些较为积极的观点。它证明，在七个非洲国家里，小企业的资本回报是一些最大公司的十倍（后者在市场中占了20%）。至少，有些小公司非但不是在勉力求生，而且业绩不错。世界银行还给其他非洲小型企业的所有者和管理人员的业务专长打了分。打分结果被绘制成了一份标准的钟形曲线图：图的一端是一些得分较低的企业，另一端是一些表现出色的企业，中间凸起的部分是得分中等的企业。该图表示非洲的小型企业并未全面落败。
The question is what can be done to improve matters. Obviously, good infrastructure and a welcoming investment climate matter. Governments have tried providing cheap loans or grants to pay the wages of an extra employee. This had no effect. Nor did giving special grants to female business owners, as happened in Ghana. But free management training did help. The trouble is that most enterprises see no point in it: asked whether lack of management expertise was a problem, only 3% of Brazilian small firms said yes.
问题在于如何采取措施去改善现状。显然，良好的基础设施和宽松的投资环境尤为重要。有些国家的政府试图提供低息贷款或是补助，来让企业能为更多的员工支付工资。此举并未见效。而像加纳那样为女性企业主提供特别补助也同样于事无补。但免费的管理培训的确有效果。症结在于大多数企业并不了解管理培训的意义——有人曾经就缺乏管理专长会不会给企业带来麻烦这个问题对巴西的小公司进行了问询，只有3%的公司给了肯定的答案。
Learning from abroad, though, makes a big difference. In 1979 Desh, a Bangladeshi garments firm, sent 130 of its staff for an eight-month course at a South Korean textile plant. At the time, Bangladesh had no textile exports and no modern industry. When the trainees got back, almost all of them set up their own firms. Today Bangladesh has 3.6m textile workers, 80% of them women, generating $13 billion of exports a year. Mr Yunus should be proud.
然而，向国外取经的确效果显著。1979年，孟加拉服装公司 Desh 派遣了130名员工到韩国的一家纺织品工厂进行了为期八个月的进修。当时，孟加拉的纺织品出口和现代工业都是一片空白。而当这些受训人员回国以后，他们几乎都成立了自己的公司。如今，孟加拉已经有了360万名纺织工人（其中80%为女性），纺织品年均出口产值达到了130亿美元。看到此情此景，尤努斯想必会感到宽慰。
经济学家
2012-10-11
经济学家
554次
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