The development community seems to compete with the fashion world in the faddishness of its orientations. The latest of these trends has produced an explosion of interest in small productive enterprises. Third World governments, bilateral and multilateral aid agencies, and an assortment of nongovernmental institutions have all come to emphasize the potential contribution of small producers to the development process. The literature in this field has grown in volume and diversity. Some writers have paid particular attention to the needs and growth potential of the smallest producers, often referred to as "microenterprises." Others have focused on the fact that many small producers operate outside the government's regulatory net, characterizing them as the "informal sector."2 While a stream of books and articles has appeared in professional journals as well as in the popular press, the number of careful analyses of small enterprises remains limited. Our understanding of the detailed characteristics of small enterprises and of their role in the process of structural transformation is far from complete. This makes the recent study of small enterprises by I. Little, D. Mazumdar, and J. Page, which forms the core of this review article, a particularly important contribution.3 As the title of the book states, it aspires to provide a comparative analysis of small manufacturing enterprises in India and other developing countries. Written by three highly respected scholars, it is a principal outcome of a major World Bank research effort involving studies of small producers in India, Korea, Taiwan, the Philippines, and Colombia.4 While these separate investigations were originally designed as an integrated study, for a variety of reasons the integration of the findings of the individual country studies has never taken place. Information from other countries is introduced