This report presents a framework - Skills Toward Employment and Productivity (STEP), that provides a simple yet comprehensive way to look at skills development. It brings together research evidence and practical experience from a range of areas-from research on the determinants of early...

This book presents qualitative and quantitative analyses on Bolivia's informal sector, the reasons why firms are informal, and the impact of normalization on their profitability. The analysis finds that the impact of tax registration on profitability depends on firm size and the ability to issue...

Bolivia's informal economic sector is the largest in Latin America, and women-owned businesses tend to be overrepresented in the informal sector and to be less profitable than firms in the formal sector. This study seeks to better understand gender-based differences in firms' tendencies toward...

"This paper examines the impact of trade with Japan, North America, and the European Union on technology diffusion and total factor productivity growth in Korea, Mexico, and Jordan. Measures of foreign research and development are constructed based on industry-specific research and development...

"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...

"It is so widely recognized that innovation is a key driver of economic growth that it is cliche to say so. This article studies product innovation by firms with data from 68 countries, covering more than 25,000 firms in eight manufacturing sectors. The author assesses the predictions of...

"This paper presents new evidence on the causal links between changes in the business environment and firm productivity growth. It contributes to the literature in three important aspects. First, it constructs a unique database merging information from two large firm-level databases. The samples...