Digital technology offers the potential to lower the costs of delivering business training, and to enable it to be scaled across a wide geographic area. But there are questions about how feasible such...
Standard in-person business training programs are costly and difficult to scale to the millions of microenterprises in the developing world. The authors conducted an experiment to test the feasibility...
The service sector accounted for two-thirds of economic growth in emerging market and developing economies over the past three decades. It consists of a wide range of activities, ranging from high-skilled...
The services sector has been a critical contributor to economic growth in Vietnam but its performance lags comparators The services sector has been the economy’s largest sector for the past decade. Looking...
This chapter presents comprehensive firm-level evidence from the Business Pulse Surveys (BPS) and Enterprise Surveys (ES) conducted by the World Bank Group across 18 countries in sub-Saharan Africa (SSA)...
The services sector has been a critical contributor to economic growth in Vietnam but its performance lags comparators The services sector has been the economy’s largest sector for the past decade. Looking...
Kazakhstan’s economy depends heavily on extractives, with many other industries linked to them. Perhaps the most telling indicator of a stalled structural transformation is the stagnant spatial organization...
This paper characterizes the firm size distribution by exploiting establishment-level censuses covering both formal and informal firms in Sub-Saharan Africa. The paper finds a "missing middle" in the employment-based...
This paper uses a novel firm-level dataset and finds a missing middle in the employment based firm size distribution in four sub-Saharan African countries. This missing middle hinges on the inclusion of...
Throughout history, industrialization has been synonymous with development. However, the trend of premature deindustrialization and the spread of automation technologies associated with Industry 4.0 has...
Throughout history, industrialization has been synonymous with development. However, the trend of premature deindustrialization and the spread of automation technologies associated with Industry 4.0 has...
Firm capabilities—the abilities and practices to operate and innovate—are considered important drivers of firm performance. While the analysis of their importance is well established in developed countries...
In most countries in Africa, the informal sector is large and exhibits low levels of productivity compared to the formal economy: informal firms are typically small, inefficient, and run by entrepreneurs...
Relying on a novel dataset covering more than 120,000 firms in 60 countries, this paper contributes to the debate about policies to support businesses through the COVID-19 pandemic. While governments around...
Relying on a novel dataset covering more than 120,000 firms in 60 countries, this paper con-tributes to the debate about D policies to support businesses through the COVID-19 pandemic. While governments...
This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the short-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on businesses worldwide with a focus on developing countries. The results are based on a novel data set...
Evidence from several countries reveals that nations that have open economies tend to enjoy higher income than those with closed economies (Lind and Ramondo 2018). Openness to hosting multinationalfirms...
Convergence of productivity of Czech firms towards peer countries is slow, especially for smaller firms. The Czech Ministry of Industry and Trade (MIT) is developing a new small and medium enterprise (SME)...
In most countries in Africa, the informal sector is large and exhibits low levels of productivity compared to the formal economy: informal firms are typically small, inefficient, and run by entrepreneurs...
Firm capabilities - abilities and practices to operate and innovate - are considered important drivers of firm performance. While the analysis of their importance is well established in developed countries...