The shopkeepers are hiring more people.

AFCEN Association of Women Shopkeepers and Traders of the Niger

Nearly everyone interviewed said they had work (architects, doctors, nurses, teachers, bookkeepers, administration members, six or seven policemen, shopkeepers, prosecutor, builders, workers at a water plant).

Economic development Association of Women Shopkeepers and Traders of the Niger Action for Integrated Rural Developments and Support for social and economic activities of rural women, among others

Little has changed since then. Local pharmacists from Lahore to Lusaka continue to sell a variety of brands of the same drug at different prices and shopkeepers are called upon to give a candid opinion of their benefits and shortcomings.

Gone would be the family farms, artisan yards, and the nation of shopkeepers, as Napoleon is alleged to have scornfully referred to Britain. All these petty bourgeois activities would be plowed over by the equivalent of today s Zara, Toyota, Airbus, or Walmart.

A society in which most workers are self proprietors shopkeepers, independent professionals, or artists and set their own terms of employment while making an adequate living is feasible only when economy wide productivity is already very high. High productivity services such as IT or finance require well trained workers, not the unskilled kind that poor countries have in abundance.

The debate around opening the retail sector to foreign investment is currently being framed, on the one hand, by the need to modernize supply chains and, on the other hand, by the desire to protect small shopkeepers livelihoods. Those who support the decision argue that India s supply chains are simply too wasteful, and that only the finance and knowhow of big, international retail chains can upgrade them.