# Literature Review

A significant body of research on gender and entrepreneurship exists globally, however, it is a relatively new area of study for Myanmar. The research listed in the following paragraphs presents the latest findings and thinking which exists globally, regionally, and where available, specifically to Myanmar. It covers the adoption of informal employee benefits, such as family friendly working conditions and the provision of sick leave and maternity leave, as well as the barriers and challenges to business growth relevant to both male and female entrepreneurs.

## • **Barriers to business growth**

**In Myanmar, SMEs face a range of challenges and barriers to their development.** Local businesses have been suffering from challenges such as lack of access to capital and burdensome tax and monetary policies. One of the largest barriers to doing business as an SME in Myanmar is the lack of access to finance and high interest rates.<sup>10</sup> Bureaucratic and administrative processes create an added burden on business owners, indeed, access to public services is reduced due to cumbersome and time-consuming procedures (Kapteyn and Wah, 2016). The regulatory environment is complex, which results in different degrees of non-compliance in several areas of enterprise activity. Many different government authorities are responsible for business registration and licensing. Enterprises perceive that the role of government in relieving business difficulties could be in providing easier access to credit, assisting with technical know-how, and easing access to quality raw materials.<sup>11</sup> All of these factors limit the opportunities for entrepreneurs to grow their businesses.

**An additional limiting factor for the development of the private sector in Myanmar is the ongoing political conflict of the past 60 years.** The nexus between fragility and business in the case of Myanmar is unique and is marked by idiosyncratic characteristics of the country’s historical trajectory, ethnic subnational conflict, and other cultural elements, which make it significantly different from other fragile contexts (Egreteau and Mangan, 2018). Conflict affects business development through several different channels; trade through ethnic areas suffers from the legacy and persistence of conflict; transit fees, levied at checkpoints at the porous borders in Myanmar’s mountainous periphery, disincentivize trade, business growth and long-term investment in these areas (Jolliffe, 2015); furthermore, the informal trade that transits through these areas, undermines legitimate businesses, as well as, government efforts to mobilize taxes and build better trade facilitation institutions (Egreteau and Mangan, 2018).

**In Myanmar, women entrepreneurs face different and more severe challenges compared to their male counterparts.** Constraints faced by women entrepreneurs in low income countries mainly arise from gender discrimination, work-family conflict, difficulty raising capital, lack of infrastructure, unstable business, economic and political (BEP) environments, and lack of training and education (Panda, 2018), in addition to heavy household chores and limited access to finance (Tambunan, 2017). Moreover, a study conducted in Indonesia by The Asia Foundation (2013) found that access to finance is a constraint for women because they use personal savings for the initial capital

> 10 Descriptive report, Myanmar Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise Survey, 2017. 11 Ibid.

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