Worlds apart? The World Bank’s business rankings and small entrepreneurship in Tajikistan

Abstract

ABSTRACT This article contrasts the World Bank’s policy-oriented, standardized assessment of the business climate and small business in Tajikistan with an alternative, bottom-up reading of local entrepreneurship focused on the life stories and business experiences of the young Tajik business community. It shows that the World Bank’s business evaluations and rankings, Doing Business and Enterprise Survey, offer a top-down understanding of business in this post-Soviet Central Asian country, which is filtered through an underlying neoliberal policy paradigm. This paradigm promotes economic liberalization, rivalry and individual responsibility for wellbeing at the expense of a welfare state, solidarity and common interest. The article proposes a different account which is centered on the socio-economic, political and moral embeddedness of local business practices. Four aspects of doing business are analyzed: informality, the role of the state in regulating business, bribing, and the relevance of social networks. Such an alternative, ethnographically informed account is needed because this organization’s publications are seen by policymakers as an authoritative source of knowledge and, as a result, serve as a powerful global governance tool influencing economic reforms worldwide. These reforms, however, often exercise a negative effect on local economic lifeworlds.