 Well, we've had three very different papers on three very different topics With one unifying theme and so for a discussant it makes it a bit difficult to try to give overarching Interpretations or lessons from the the presentation But let me start with the overarching theme Which is every one of these presentations begins with the center of focus on the enterprise serve focus is the firm In a Ruslim's case, it's the firm as the business premises of the entrepreneur She may or may not be a woman in Lawrence's case, it's the firm as part of the global trading system and In Nina's case, it's the firm as part of a labor relations system The first thing I'll have to say is that anyone who has been in the position of trying to study firms Particularly in Africa Cannot help but come away with a serious case of data envy all of these Firm level analyses are based on Data that have been collected over a significant period of time in a panel form sometimes using administrative data, which is not accessible to the general public and All of which in a sense help us to understand if not completely Causality at least the beginning of some meaningful correlations, which I think is important I make that point simply because if you think about the plethora of data that exists on households and The paucity of data that exists on firms as we begin to shift our emphasis from Welfare if you will or poverty if you will as a measure of development to productivity and Growth as a measure of development The donor community needs to assist Governments to collect this kind of data and make it publicly available So data envy is is a problem But it's also I think a very relevant policy objective to have if one is wanting to be serious about the study of enterprises I'll make three broad connections. I think in this and then make a couple of speculations about how this relates to public policy I was struck in particular in Lawrence's presentation About the relevance of global value chains to the South African story and indeed in listening to Nina's discussion of the different incidences of Strike activity and other forms of labor relations problems In Vietnam between foreign-owned enterprises and small and medium enterprises again We know most of the foreign-owned enterprises in Vietnam are part of some set of global value chains I think What it suggests of course is that? We don't understand in the context of global value chains perhaps as deeply as we might wish the Role of exports in terms of learning and in terms of what types of learning take place within the firm the I wasn't surprised when Lawrence found that South African firms at export to the neighborhood In the regional economy learn less than South African firms that export to more demanding economies elsewhere I also wasn't surprised to have him tell me that firms that import are more productive than firms that do not import Even if they're engaged in the process of exporting that's fairly well established and is part again of the story of Global value chains if you want to be part of a global value chain you have to import in order to be able to to be an exporter The question I would have is whether or not This industrial malaise That Lawrence suggests exists in South Africa Might in some way not be related to the labor relations issues that Nina has raised in Vietnam We know the South African labor market has a lot of problems One of the puzzles that many of us who study through the lens of firm capabilities South African industrial development have is why a society so endowed with high capability firms is not basically cleaning up in the world of global value chains and One possible suggestion may be it's part of the labor relations story So there are connections between at least two of the papers that we have here at least through the mechanism of the global value chain itself Then we come to the question of labor relations and here what I guess I would have liked to Heard a bit more from Nina about and it does relate to a Ruslan's point about entrepreneurship Whether you worry about women or whether you worry about entrepreneurs in general and the performance of the firm is How the characteristics of the owners of the firm in her data interact with the gains that are produced by unionization Are there meaningful correlations at least between the characteristics of firm owners or female-owned firms more likely to be? hospitable to labor relations are certain kinds of foreign-owned firms likely to be more hospitable I'm thinking in terms of The Japanese of course are very fond of their process of kaizen Management training that emphasizes a great deal mutual respect between management and labor and bringing labor into the production process as part of the solution to production problems So is ownership relevant is Entrepreneurship relevant is gender relevant in terms of the labor relations picture could turn out that all of those are important Again the problem of course is probably the data more than anything else and Jerusalem's work of course reminds us that management matters that owners matter and that owners matter for the performance of the of the firm I Like the part of the presentation that she did in terms of differentiating between the skill sets that are possessed by Men and women as they approach the management of firms And we know now there's a very large popular literature on the different characteristics of male and female managers for example I'll come back to that when I talk a bit about the public policy implications of this work because differentiated skills suggest to me that we might want to think about differentiated approaches to management training and to the support of small and medium enterprises rather than have one size fits all or a gender-blind approach to the development of Small and medium enterprises Well, how does this sort of work toward policy? I Think the first point is fairly simple the global value chain story I think reminds us and certainly Lawrence's point about the increasing drumbeat in South Africa To discourage imports or regard imports is somehow displacing domestic production I might add that that malaise seems to have spread to my own country with a vengeance Tells us that we really need to keep reminding policymakers that in a world of global value chains The 1950s idea that you have vertically integrated industries that you protect through tariffs is No longer a way to succeed in the global economy So I think there's a powerful policy message here It's reinforced by the fact that the firms that import and Export are more productive than the firms that export only It is complicated by the fact that it may also be the case that South Africa as a middle-income country Has a different profile of learning behaviors than maybe the case For exporting firms in low-income countries and what we do think we know from the learning to compete work Is that there is actually a structural change process that takes place in trade? At low levels of income firms learn capabilities. They learn them from demanding buyers They learn them from repeated relationships and these resolve into changes in work practices and tacit knowledge in terms of management By the time you get to being a middle-income country or a high-income country One of the reasons why the evidence on learning by exporting tends to evaporate is that you have a very different skill set So it's not a foregone conclusion that learning by exporting takes place everywhere. It may take place in low-income settings But it is important I think to keep in mind that to the extent that one wants to benefit from the global value chain Openness on both sides of the equation imports and exports are important. I Think Nina's main policy lesson for us is probably something that's very apt as one thinks about the the African context We've heard a lot today about the need to create jobs And about the demographic challenge and the jobs orientation But it's important to keep in mind as obviously Vietnamese workers have begun to discover and keep in mind that not every job is the same job and That some jobs are better than others and the dimensions of betterness Not only include wages, but they also include working conditions They include safety and to some extent they include a feeling of mutual respect between workers and managers as to the proper conduct of enterprise relations So the decent work agenda remains an important agenda and to the extent that one can link that to firm Performance into the characteristics of firms and perhaps to firm level training. I Think it remains a very important thing just to keep reminding ourselves that it's good jobs were after or decent work That were after it's not any job Finally the question of training and capacity building management capacity building I've been involved for some years now in some work with Japanese on Kaizen and I have to say I'm becoming increasingly persuaded That Kaizen which was invented in a way as an ad hoc response to very poor labor relations in post-war Japan May offer us a slightly alternative path in terms of creating an environment within which Workers and managers can seem to have a perceived mutual goal in the performance of the firm May not be the only way to do this, but the important point is to keep in mind that the American model of labor management relations. I'll call it the American model because I think that's probably the most dramatic example of it of conflict is Not necessarily the only model that one can employ and as we think about new forms of management training And as we think about new forms of capacity building in small and medium enterprises, I think there's an important objective here to keep in mind that these may have to be differentiated by gender and They may have to be differentiated by circumstance in terms of labor management relations and other kinds of interventions that can encourage improved performance at the level of the firm So with those few thoughts trying to put something together that gave a coherent Thank you all very much