Globalization poses the imperative for firms to link with other actors and find new ways to interact and learn from the relationship. Employing original empirical evidence and featuring new case studies from Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Nicaragua, Upgrading to Compete shows that the form of...

This paper studies the effect of government-backed partial credit guarantees on firms' performance. These guarantees are automatically granted to firms without enough collateral in order to lift their credit constraints. We put together a panel, covering the period 1997-2007, that combines data...

Government-owned development banks have often been justified by the need to respond to financial market imperfections that hinder the establishment and growth of promising businesses, and as a result, stifle economic development more generally. However, evidence on the effectiveness of these...

The paper uses microeconomic data to characterize entrepreneurs by income group and selected household, individual and business characteristics, finding that entrepreneurship is rare but more frequent in the upper class than the middle or lower classes. Middle-class entrepreneurs are, on...

This book arose out of a study commissioned by the Micro, Small and Medium Enterprise Division of the Inter-American Development Bank aimed at researching cases based on Latin American experiences with competitive cooperation among enterprises, whether brought about as a result of specific...

Do the programs that aim to promote and develop industry clusters (also known as Cluster Development Programs) work? Do they have an impact on enterprise development? This paper offers an insight into the methods that can help answer these fundamental questions through solid quantitative...

Globalization poses the imperative for firms to link with other actors and find new ways to interact and learn from the relationship. Employing original empirical evidence and featuring new case studies from Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Nicaragua, Upgrading to Compete shows that the form of...