Digital financial services (DFS) have expanded rapidly over the last decade, particularly in sub-Saharan Africa. They have been accompanied by claims that they can alleviate poverty, empower women, help businesses grow, and improve macroeconomic outcomes and government effectiveness. As they have become more widespread, some controversy has arisen as governments have identified DFS revenues and profits as potential sources of tax revenue. Evidence-based policy in relation to taxing DFS requires an understanding of the enablers and barriers (preconditions) of DFS, as well as the impacts of DFS. This report aims to present insights from an Evidence Gap Map (EGM) on the enablers and barriers, and subsequent impacts, of DFS, including any research related to taxation. An EGM serves to clearly identify the gaps in the evidence base in a visually intuitive way, allowing researchers to address these gaps. This can help to shape future research agendas. Our EGM draws on elements from the systematic review methodology. We develop a transparent set of inclusion criteria and comprehensive search strategy to identify relevant studies, and assess the confidence we can place in their causal findings. An extensive search initially identified 389 studies, 205 of which met the inclusion criteria and were assessed based on criteria of cogency, transparency and credibility. We categorised 40 studies as high confidence, 97 as medium confidence, and 68 as low confidence. We find that the evidence base is still relatively thin, but growing rapidly. The high-confidence evidence base is dominated by quantitative approaches, especially experimental study designs. The geographical focus of many studies is East Africa. The dominant DFS intervention studied is mobile money. The majority of studies focus on DFS usage for payments and transfers; fewer studies focus on savings, very few on credit, and none on insurance. The strongest evidence base on enablers and barriers relates to how user attributes and industry structure affect DFS. Little is known about how policy and politics, including taxation, and macroeconomic and social factors, affect DFS. The evidence base on impacts is strongest at the individual and household level, and partly covers the business level. The impact of DFS on the macroeconomy, and the meso level of industry and government, is very limited. We find no high-confidence evidence on the role of taxation. We need more higher quality evidence on a variety of topics. This should particularly look at enablers, constraints and impacts, including the role of taxation, beyond the individual and household level. Research going forward should cover more geographic areas and a wider range of purposes DFS can serve (use cases), including savings, and particularly credit. More methodological variety should be encouraged – experiments can be useful, but are not the best method for all research questions.

Business environment reform (BER) targets inadequate business regulations. It is intended to remove constraints to business investment, enabling growth and job creation, and create opportunities for international business to contribute to and benefit from this growth. However, there is a lack of detailed knowledge of the impact of BER on gender and inclusion (G&I). While a review of existing literature suggests that in general, there is no direct link between BER and G&I, indirect links are likely through the influence of BER on firm performance. Outcomes will be influenced by the differential ways in which women-led firms experience the business environment when compared to their male counterparts, with disparities based on how they are treated under the law, as well as structural and sociocultural factors. The fact that in many countries, female-led firms are fewer and smaller than those of their male counterparts, and may operate in different sectors, also affects these dynamics. This research offers new insights through an in-depth analysis of the impact of the Pelayanan Terpadu Satu Pintu (PTSP) or one-stop shop business licensing reform in 2009 on firm performance in Indonesia, and how these impacts vary based on the gender of firm leadership. The results find that on average, firms benefited from improved business performance (sales), as a direct or indirect effect of this reform, as well as an increase in the number of medium and large-scale firms. Outside Jakarta (Bali, Banten, Lampung), women-led firms experienced a small but significant benefit relative to male-led firms, related to both sales and the number of medium and large-scale firms they run. In Jakarta, women-led firms continued to lag behind men and there were no significant effects on employment, and this held across province and gender. These findings are based on an analysis of the PTSP reform using data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey (WBES), a survey of small, medium and large firms (i.e. with more than four employees) which took place in Indonesia between 2009 and 2015.

This report analyses the impact of COVID-19 on women in the global garment and electronics value chains, with a focus on women working in production in Asia. Building on a previous K4D assessment of COVID-19 and its implications for global value chains (Quak, 2020), this report addresses the need to understand how COVID-19 specifically impacts women in global value chains. The report seeks to answer the question “how have male and female workers been affected differently by the COVID-19 pandemic, particularly regarding employment and the ability to work differently?”. The review presented is based on existing evidence of the gendered impacts of COVID-19 on the garment and electronics value chains in Asia and draws on both academic and grey literature. At the time of research (March 2021), the evidence was relatively sparse, frequently relying on initial surveys completed early on in the pandemic. In addition, data disaggregated by gender is rare. Where these data are not available, our approach is to synthesise what we know about the impact of COVID-19 with what we know about the nature of gender in the garment and electronics sectors and to conclude the likely impacts of COVID-19 on gender.

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This rapid review synthesises the literature from academic, policy, and knowledge institution sources on how business environment reforms in middle-income countries impacts on poverty, gender and inclusion. Although, there is limited evidence on the direct impact of business environment reforms on poverty, gender, and inclusion, this review illustrates that there is evidence of indirect effects of such reforms. Business environment reform (BER) targets inadequate business regulations and institutions, in order to remove constraints to business investment and expansion, enabling growth and job creation, as well as new opportunities for international business to contribute to and benefit from this growth. However, there is a lack of detailed knowledge of the impact of BER on gender and inclusion (G&I) outcomes, in terms of the potential to remove institutional barriers which exclude formerly marginalised groups from business opportunities, in ways that promote equal access to resources, opportunities, benefits, and services. The literature shows how the business environment affects women in business, and how women’s experiences of a given business environment can be different from those of men. This is the result of disparities in how they are treated under the law, but also based on structural and sociocultural factors which influence how men and women behave in a given business environment and the barriers they face.