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 around the world have implemented a wide range of policy support measures, evidence on the...

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 collected by the World Bank Group and several partner institutions in 51 countries covering...

The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the digital transformation of businesses. Using a unique global panel dataset, this paper documents the patterns of digital adoption during the pandemic across firms in 57 (mostly developing) countries. The data show the tale of two stories. On one hand, the...

Convergence of productivity of Czech firms towards peer countries is slow, especially for smaller firms. Czech labor productivity was 68.3 of that in Germany and the productivity gap is in particular large for micro, small and medium enterprises (MSMEs). MSMEs (defined as having less than 250...

The COVID-19 pandemic has struck businesses across the globe with unprecedented impacts. The world economy has been hit hard and firms have experienced a myriad of challenges, but these challenges have been heterogeneous across firms. This paper examines one important dimension of this...

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, cost-savings, and impact of delivering live training sessions over Zoom to microentrepreneurs...

This paper quantifies the gains in gross domestic product per capita from closing gender employment gaps in the Middle East and North Africa, using three neoclassical growth models. The paper starts with baseline impacts from the Gender Employment Gap Index, which suggests that in the long run,...

An entrepreneurial ecosystem consists of the set of complementary factors required to start a business with the potential to scale up and innovate in a particular geographic space. This paper develops a framework using an occupational choice model with knowledge-based hierarchies to assess...