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. 

摘要

本文将世界银行对塔吉克斯坦商业环境和小企业的以政策为导向的标准化评估与另类、自下而上的当地创业读物进行对比，重点是塔吉克斯坦年轻商业社区的生活故事和商业经历。它显示了世界银行的商业评估和排名、《营商环境 与 企业调查》，提供对这个后苏联中亚国家的自上而下的商业理解，这是通过潜在的新自由主义政策范式过滤的。这种范式以牺牲福利国家、团结和共同利益为代价，促进了经济自由化、竞争和个人对福祉的责任。这篇文章提出了一个不同的解释，它以当地商业实践的社会经济、政治和道德嵌入为中心。分析了做生意的四个方面：非正式性、国家在规范商业中的作用、贿赂和社交网络的相关性。需要这样一种替代的、人种学知情的说明，因为该组织的出版物被决策者视为权威的知识来源，因此，作为影响全球经济改革的强大全球治理工具。然而，这些改革往往对当地经济生活产生负面影响。