The Donor Committee for Enterprise Development's Business Environment Working Group (BEWG) commissioned BSS to conduct a study to gain a better understanding of the ways business environment reforms can ameliorate labour productivity; and to identify new and emerging (best) practices and policies in this field.
- Clients: Donor Committee for Enterprise Development (DCED)
- Methods: Literature review, data and project document analysis, interviews, case studies
- Time period: September 2016 to February 2017
- Services and products: Evaluation report, briefing note
Our research finds that labour productivity, a key component of development, is influenced by a range of factors, the most important ones being training, innovation, employee engagement, incentives as well as health and safety within in the workplace. Furthermore, the analysis of project documentation selected by the BEWG members as "good practice" revealed, on the one hand, that tailored interventions, solid partnerships with key market actors and applying market system development approaches are among the success factors in donors' endeavours to improve labour productivity. On the other, insufficient access to beneficiaries, low trust levels among market players and the difficulty of up scaling and influencing policymaking are identified as constraints.