Can you help some firms without hurting others? Yes, in a new Kenyan business training evaluation

There are a multitude of government programs that directly try to help particular firms to grow. Business training is one of the most common forms of such support. A key concern when thinking about the impacts of such programs is whether any gains to participating firms come at the expense of their market competitors. E.g. perhaps you train some businesses to market their products slightly better, causing customers to abandon their competitors and simply reallocate which businesses sell the product. This reallocation can still be economically beneficial if it improves allocative efficiency, but failure to account for the losses to untrained firms would cause you to overestimate the overall program impact. This is a problem for most impact evaluations, which randomize at the individual level which firms get to participate in a program.

In a new working paper, I report on a business training experiment I ran with the ILO in Kenya, which was designed to measure these spillovers. We find over a three-year period that trained firms are able to sell more, without their competitors selling less – by diversifying the set of products they produce and building underdeveloped markets.