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>Liquidity, entrepreneurship, small enterprise maturation, and the development process: The case of furniture manufacture in Colonia Libertad, Tijuana, Mexico.
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Liquidity, entrepreneurship, small enterprise maturation, and the development process: The case of furniture manufacture in Colonia Libertad, Tijuana, Mexico.
This dissertation examines small enterprise progress among furniture manufacturers in Colonia Libertad and elsewhere in Tijuana, Baja California.. The setting is a paradoxical boomtown, where low-wage employment has expanded from export-enclave manufacturing and tourist commerce, notwithstanding effective demand remains secularly constrained depressing the market for consumer durables, and domestic furniture retail distribution is dominated by overpowering monopsonies offering obligatory consumer credit. The principal conclusion of this economic anthropology is that lack of liquidity (accumulated working capital and/or access to short-term credit) strongly constrains capable entrepreneurship, hindering enterprise maturation. Lack of liquidity prevents hustling small enterprise from overwhelming local monopsonies through salesmanship and volume. It also limits access in markets where progress is less constrained, even unbounded: (i) custom order production for Tijuana's (often dollar-bearing) elite, also for tourists and Southern California elite intermediaries; (ii) one-shot export contracts regionally; and (iii) stable, long-term export contracts regionally and beyond. Most producers remain trapped in domestic retail markets with dismal returns and excess capacity, accumulating virtually nothing, with inadequate access to the supplier credit or short-term bank credit that power advance. Product debasement through low-cost materials' substitution has not freed the small enterprise from commercial dominance. Export requires even greater liquidity, investment in efficiency-generating fixed capital, and entrepreneurial marketing and language skills. Few manage it.; The development banking apparatus is contradictorily structured and contributes insignificantly to small enterprise advance. Improvement in the system's information concerning entrepreneurship through either restructuration or improvement in incentives to the quasi-private banks is mandatory. Although Mexico's conversion to an export-oriented development paradigm spurred opportunities, the Mexican bureaucracy's assistance to indigenous Mexican firms is rarely constructive. Liquidity-offering small enterprise credit cooperatives linked to a reinvigorated development bank are advocated.; Entrepreneurial human capital is crucial to enterprise success, particularly in export, but capable entrepreneurship is often stymied for lack of liquidity. The notion that capable entrepreneurship is that which can resolve any constraint in spite of all obstacles is tautological and reductionist. The equally extreme position that failures of small enterprise are entirely structural is also simplistic.
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