Chris Blattman

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factory_floor

Guest post by Jeff Mosenkis of Innovations for Poverty Action.

factory_floor

  • Chris Blattman is on the EconTalk podcast talking about his work with Stefan Dercon on sweatshops in Ethiopia. As an economist who studies poverty, one of the interesting things he learned from hanging out in factories is what the owners say is really constraining them from growing. It isn’t lack of funding or infrastructure, it’s lack of middle management. What they really need to grow are people good at accounting, HR, mergers, and the like:

    “they need all of these skills that we don’t usually think about as poverty or development economists. … They say, ‘I can only do so much. I have all this capital; I made all this money,’ in real estate or trading or mine money or ill-gotten gains or wherever they got this money. And they only have so much time. So they really need people who can organize. And they need people who can help them execute transactions, whether it’s buying a company or helping them build sales contacts and do things overseas.”

And a big thanks to Cara Vu for editing help.

 

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