# **7. Conclusions and Suggestions for Future Work**

The last few years have seen rapid growth in the number of randomized trials evaluating business training programs, providing a growing body of evidence in an area with large policy interest. However, to date a number of challenges have hampered how much we can learn from these studies, with methodological concerns and heterogeneity in both training content, and in the characteristics of who is trained, making comparisons across studies difficult. Many of the key questions needed to justify largescale policy interventions in this area remain unanswered. Researchers have learned more in the interim about how to do firm experiments better, suggesting these difficulties are not insurmountable.

In order to learn more from the next generation of studies, we believe the following elements are needed.

1. **Much larger samples or more homogeneous firms** . Rather than more studies with 100 to 500 individuals in each treatment or control group, we ideally need studies to move to samples of several thousand or more. This would increase the power of studies, and allow more consideration of what types of people training works for best. An alternative to large crosssectional samples is to reduce the heterogeneity of the sample by focusing on firms within one industry and size category, and collecting much more frequent time series data on these firms (McKenzie, 2011, 2012).

2. **Better measurement of outcomes** . Measuring firm profits and revenues has proved a real challenge for many studies, and even less evidence is available on how exactly training changes the firm’s production process. Further efforts to improve the measurement of financial information (and to ensure that there is not just a measurement effect of training) are needed, while focus on a specific industry or sector may allow more detailed production level monitoring of physical outputs and inputs.

3. **Designing experiments to measure spillovers** . This could include more use of GPS measurement to measure local spillovers (Gibson and McKenzie, 2007), and randomizing the intensity of training at the local market level to see whether the effects differ when all firms competing in a local area are trained versus when only some of them are trained, building on the work of Calderon et al. (2012).

4. **Measuring trajectories of outcomes over longer periods of time** . The impacts of training may differ in the short and medium terms, so measuring outcomes at multiple points in time will enable better study of whether impacts take time to materialize, or whether others which emerge quickly persist.

5. **Testing which elements of content matter** . With larger samples, one can build on the work of Drexler et al. (2012) and test different forms of training, in order to determine which elements of business skills have most impact, and whether training needs to focus on entrepreneurial personality as well as processes. However, researchers need to avoid the temptation to do this at the cost of ending up with insufficient power in each treatment arm.

6. **Understanding market failures and building market-based solutions** . Almost every study has given training away for free and still experienced difficulties getting take-up. There are many open interesting questions concerning how one helps develop a market for these business 23