"This paper analyzes the distributional impacts of trade reforms in rural areas of Bangladesh. The liberalization of trade in irrigation equipment and fertilizer markets during the early 1990s has led to structural changes in the agricultural sector and a significant increase in rice...

"There is a growing literature that investigates the effect of trade liberalization on productivity. Nearly all such studies assume that trade policy is determined independently of productivity, hence it is exogenous. The author shows that this assumption is not valid in general, both...

"During the 1990s, foreign direct investment in producer service sectors in Latin America was massive. Such investment may increase the quality of services, reduce their cost, and offer opportunities for knowledge spillovers to downstream users of the services. This paper examines the effects of...

Improving the investment climate is a key pillar of the World Bank's private sector development strategy. Without a good investment climate, firms and entrepreneurs of all types-from farmers to micro-enterprises to local manufacturing concerns and multinationals-have few opportunities and...

In the decades prior to the Asian financial crisis, the Malaysian economy experienced rapid growth and a significant structural transformation. It went from an economy that relied on agriculture and commodities to one dominated by manufacturing and services. Since then, however, Malaysia's...

This paper looks at firm-level evidence on the African business environment from surveys undertaken for Investment Climate Assessments by the World Bank in 2000-2004. These surveys confirm a pattern of generally low "factory-floor" productivity, and show that this is partly due to business...

"The economies of small developing states tend to be more fragile than those of large ones. This paper examines this issue in a dynamic context by focusing on the impact of the brain drain on North-South trade-related technology diffusion and total factor productivity growth in small and large...

"This paper surveys the recent literature which examines the impact of business climate variables on productivity and growth in developing countries using enterprise surveys. Comparable enterprise surveys today cover some 70,000 firms in over 100 countries around the world. The literature that...

"Empirical explorations of the growth and productivity impacts of infrastructure have been characterized by ambiguous (countervailing signs) results with little robustness. A number of explanations of the contradictory findings have been proposed. These range from the crowd-out of private by...