Micro-entrepreneurs and occupational hazards: Why do poor people settle for low-return employment?

• by Stuart Rutherford and Rahul Chatterjee
• Aug 26, 2019
• 1 min
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In this blog, we highlight why the poor wish to engage in unskilled labor and petty trade by studying the records of respondents from low-income households in a “financial diary” research project in central Bangladesh.

In this blog, MSC attempts to decipher the reasons why the poor wish to engage in unskilled labor and petty trade instead of running a higher-skilled business. We wanted to understand the challenges that they faced and the reason behind their reluctance, considering the better earning opportunity that owning a microenterprise offered. We sought answers by scrutinizing highly detailed records of respondents from low-income households in a “financial diary” research project in central Bangladesh. We analyzed the factors that led households to their occupations and how those factors influenced overseas employment, micro-enterprise ownership, and casual employments of the poor.