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Comments on
Trade, Global Value Chains and Small and Medium-
Sized Enterprises: Country-Level (Case) Study

Cassey Lee
Feb 2020
Brief Summary
• Goal of paper – examine factors affecting
SMEs engagement in local and
national/international markets in case of
Kyrgyzstan
• Data set – Enterprise Surveys covering
2013 & 2019
• Overview of SMEs (& policies)
• Literature Review
• Probit model of exporting
• Overall – a useful study exploring the
determinants of exporting in a land-locked
economy in post-transition period
Basic Info on Kyrgyzstan’s economy
• A brief description of Kyrgyzstan’s economy might be useful
• Population = 6.2 mil
• Landlocked
• GDP per capita
• Economic structure (sectoral GDP, employment)
• Trade orientation
• Trade structure (key imports and exports)
• Major trading partners (neighbouring countries)
Overview of SMEs in Kyrgyzstan
• Figure 1 – SMEs share of GDP
• Total SMEs =
• small business + individual entrepreneurs + peasant farms + medium-sized
firms
• Individual enterpreneurs – informal sector?
• Lack of clarity on differences between small business and individual
entrepreneurs (are both small firms)
• Relatively small share of middle-sized enterprise (missing middle)
• It might be useful to present GDP and employment share for all firm
size categories i.e. include large firms
• “regular patent payment” (p.7) – license fees?
SME Policies
• The discussions on SME policies is relatively brief – it would be useful
to discuss these policies in greater detail (even though
implementation has been lacking)
• Some of the policy-related problems appear to be related to the
economic and political transformations (or lack of) e.g. socialist 
democracy/mixed-economy
• It would be useful to discuss a bit of these factors if they are relevant
• Some of these are discussed in page 17 – perhaps a broader
discussions of these issues would be useful
Empirical Analysis
• Manufacturing sector
• Data sample size: 158 (for 2013) & 264 (for 2019)
• Some discussion of sample representativeness would be useful if national
manufacturing census is available
• Need to restructure headings for descriptive stats table (3) - e.g.
percentage of firms with female manages (rather than mean number)
• Need to clarify the meaning of “competition to unregistered firms”
• Might be useful to interaction variables
• Consider regressions for sub-samples by industry (limited by sample size)
• The analysis focus on exporting (rather than GVC) – more careful use of
term
• Institutional variables may be useful