This practitioner's guide, a companion volume to The Innovation Paradox picks up where the previous report left off. It aims to help policy makers in developing countries better formulate innovation policies. It does so by providing a rigorous typology of innovation policy instruments, including...

This paper examines empirically the links between adoption of information and communications technology (ICT), defined as usage by firms, innovation, and productivity using firm-level data for a sample of six Sub-Saharan African countries: the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Ghana, Kenya,...

While existing evidence in advanced economies suggests a possible role for technological innovation in job creation, its role in developing countries remains largely undocumented. This paper sheds light on the direct impact of technological as well as organizational innovation on firm level...

Little is known about innovation in developing countries, partly because of the lack of comparable and reliable data. Collecting data on firm-level innovation is challenging because of the subjective definition of what determines an innovation, a problem that is exacerbated in developing...

This paper uses comprehensive and comparable firm-level manufacturing census data from four Sub-Saharan African countries to examine the extent, costs, and nature of within-industry resource misallocation across heterogeneous firms. The paper finds evidence of severe misallocation in which...

Building on prior work that documented the impact of COVID-19 on firms in developing countries using the first wave of Business Pulse Surveys, this paper presents a new set of stylized facts on firm recovery, covering 65,000 observations in 38 countries. This paper suggests that: One, since the...

Technology is key to boost productivity and generate more and better quality jobs in Senegal. This paper uses a novel approach to measure technology adoption at the firm level and applies it to a representative sample of firms in Senegal. It provides new measures of technology adoption at the...

This paper estimates the impact of technology sophistication pre-COVID-19 on the performance of firms during the early stages of the pandemic. It exploits a unique data set covering firms from Brazil, Senegal, and Vietnam, using a treatment effect mediation framework to decompose the results...

This paper uses a novel approach to measure technology adoption at the firm level and applies it to a representative sample of firms in the state of Ceara in Brazil. The paper develops a new measure of technology adoption at the firm level, which identifies the purpose for which technologies are...

This paper describes the results of a new firm survey to measure technology use and adoption implemented prior to the COVID-19 pandemic in Vietnam. It analyzes the use and adoption of technology among Vietnamese firms and identifies some of the key barriers to adoption and diffusion. The...