One Day in the Life of a Business

"One day in the life of Ivan Denisovich" got Solzhenitsyn a Nobel Prize in literature. The book is dull: it describes a single day of an ordinary prisoner in a Soviet labor camp in the 1950s. However, it described a reality that few had imagined.

It would be useful to have a similar account of the life of an ordinary business in, say, Africa. Many efforts have gone into improving the environment for doing business in Africa. The Doing Business team now works in over 20 African countries. The Investment Climate Facility for Africa has even more ambitious plans.

A parallel effort exists. Abhijit Banerjee and Esther Duflo at MIT Economics have a 2006 Journal of Economic Prespectives paper on the economic lives of the poor. The authors document how the poor (those who have less than $1 a day) earn their income and how they spend it in 13, mostly African, countries.