Short-Term Impacts of Formalization Assistance and a Bank Information Session on Business Registration and Access to Finance in Malawi

Campos, Francisco ; Goldstein, Markus ; McKenzie, David

World Bank, Washington, DC

关键词: ACCESS TO BANK ACCOUNTS;    ACCESS TO CREDIT;    ACCESS TO EXTERNAL FINANCE;    ACCESS TO FINANCE;    ACCESS TO FINANCIAL SERVICES;   

DOI  :  10.1596/1813-9450-7183
RP-ID  :  WPS7183

学科分类：社会科学、人文和艺术（综合）

来源: World Bank Open Knowledge Repository

【 摘 要 】

Despite regulatory efforts designed tomake it easier for firms to formalize, informality remainsextremely high among firms in Sub-Saharan Africa. In most ofthe region, business registration in a national registry isseparate from tax registration. This paper provides initialresults from an experiment in Malawi that randomly allocatedfirms into a control group and three treatment groups: a) agroup offered assistance for costless business registration;b) a group offered assistance with costless businessregistration and (separate) tax registration; and c) a groupoffered assistance for costless business registration alongwith an information session at a bank that ended with theoffer of business bank accounts. The study finds that allthree treatments had extremely large impacts on businessregistration, with 75 percent of those offered assistancereceiving a business registration certificate. The findingsoffer a cost-effective way of getting firms to formalize inthis dimension. However, in common with other studies,information and assistance has a limited impact on taxregistration. The paper measures the short-term impacts offormalization on financial access and usage. Businessregistration alone has no impact for either men or women onbank account usage, savings, or credit. However, thecombination of formalization assistance and the bankinformation session results in significant impacts on havinga business bank account, financial practices, savings, anduse of complementary financial products.