Empowering female-owned SMEs with ICT in a group of selected Arab countries and Brazil

Abstract

This research paper embarks on a comparative empirical study to investigate the impact that ICT plays on empowering women entrepreneurs in 5 developing/emerging countries, namely Egypt, Jordan, Morocco, Algeria, as a group of Arab countries and Brazil. The World Bank's Investment Climate Assessment Surveys (ICA) is the primary source of data for the four Arab countries and Brazil. The ICA database provides comparable enterprise level data based on similar sampling techniques. The results obtained from the empirical study reveal that in the selected Arab countries, the increase in female owned SMEs is associated with a decrease in the Internal Rate of Return. However, when we control for ICT in terms of ICT index constructed using the Principal Component Analysis technique (PCA), the female owned SMEs becomes statistically insignificant; this is also the case with the ICT index. This implies that IRR is negatively associated with the female owners of the SME, and there is a no association between IRR and the access and use of ICT. In Brazil, however, neither gender nor ICT plays any role in the profitability of SMEs. However, as for the other measure for economic performance, namely the labor intensity, the findings reveal that in the selected Arab countries, the ICT index has a positive, statically significant, association with labor-intensity, while in Brazil the usage of a Website has a negative, statistically significant, association with the labor-intensity.