Leaving no-one behind in the workplace health promotion: towards regulatory equity in the Ecuadorian micro-enterprises.

The purpose of workplace public health programmes and regulations is to promote safety and health for the entire working population nationwide. Some countries limit the scope of such programmes to medium or big-sized companies, leaving out small and micro-enterprises, thus discriminating against many workers exposed to risks. This Viewpoint aims to identify inequalities in occupational health generated by the new Regulation for Workplace Health Promotion (WHP) in Ecuador. We showed how the regulation excludes all micro-enterprises and displayed the essential role of micro-enterprises in the business fabric and the Ecuadorian labour market. More than 93% of the registered companies are micro-enterprises and these include more than 25% of the employees in the formal economy. Integrating occupational health into the public health system will require deep analysis to improve protection for the working population.

Policy evaluations of microenterprise business support services in Latin America: A systematic review.

Microenterprises represent 88.4 % of Latin American enterprises, and many countries in the region have developed microenterprise promotion policies in recent years; however, rigorous evaluation remains a pending issue. To shed light on the research done on this topic over the last 20 years and propose a roadmap for the policy evaluation of microenterprise business support services and the development of microenterprise indicators, this work conducts a systematic review, following the PRISMA guidelines, of peer-reviewed journal articles examining the impact of business support services on microenterprise performance in low- and middle-income Latin American countries. We identified 679 studies, and 17 studies met the inclusion criteria. We found that the literature is surprisingly scarce; most studies focus on credits and impacts on financial performance and concentrate on Mexico; and only three articles involve randomised controlled trials. Our results have important implications for policymakers and future research.