Publish Year
2003
Thematic Area
Language
Region of Relevance
Resource Type
Author(s)
A Haroon Akram-Lodhi & Irene van Staveren
Description
This paper on SMEs in Vietnam, looks into biases that help explain the higher costs and lower profits of female-owned enterprises.  It brings together gender analysis, small scale enterprise analysis, and gender budget analysis in a development context by demonstrating that gender matters not only to the ownership of an SME, but also to its most likely principal activity, the stock of the assets that it possesses, the labour that it utilizes, the costs that it faces, the revenues that it generates, and the profits that it earns.  The paper's main thrust lies in its argument that although various factors play a role, gender biases in costs and earnings, partly caused by the tax system, are the more dominant factor.