We feature a collaborative blogpost by Pratibha Joshi and John Victor Arun Kumar, Small Enterprise Finance Centre, IFMR LEAD. 


The role of the Micro Small and Medium Enterprise (MSME) sector in India cannot be ignored. With 4.6 million enterprises, it employs 800 million people, and accounts for 45 percent of manufactured output and 40 percent of exports[1].
However many firms suffer from lower productivity and sub-optimal business decisions due to lack of business and financial management knowledge and skills. Governments across the world are looking at ways to impart necessary skills and training to enable entrepreneurs to survive in today’s competitive markets and to grow their businesses further. For instance, in India, the Ministry of MSMEs has established Entrepreneurship Development Institutes that provide classroom-based training session for entrepreneurs. In 2012-13, the MSME Ministry allocated Rs.258 million (USD 4.6 million) to NIESBUD (National Institute for Entrepreneurship…

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then every academic paper you’ve ever read is surely worth at least a dozen images. These pictures represent the data that researchers and policymakers strive so hard to produce; data that is secured with careful attention to research design and a diligent approach to data collection and project implementation. Looking at data in interactive ways help contextualize its significance and its potential impact on future research and policy decisions.
Conventionally in the social sciences, most of us are confronted with La-Tex formatted tables (with asterisks and hashtags to denote noteworthy points), clearly demarcated regression trend lines, and if we’re lucky, a dotted line to visualize the regression discontinuity point of a paper’s research methodology. Typically in Economics, we are interested in trend lines - lines that tell us about a meaningful (we hope) relationship between various factors. We have at our disposal features like the slope of …