"Most high and middle-income countries showed symptoms of skill-biased technological change in the 1980s. India-a low income country-did not, perhaps because India's traditionally controlled economy may have limited the transfer of technologies from abroad. However the economy underwent a sharp...

Differences in the investment climate have recently gained centre stage in explaining variations in competitiveness, growth and prosperity across countries or regions. The investment climate comprises institutional and policy variables that have a crucial bearing on business performance, but...

"Drawing on the World Bank Investment Climate Assessment surveys, this paper investigates the relationship between firm-level technical efficiency and the investment climate for 22 developing economies and eight manufacturing industries. The authors first propose three measures of firms'...

"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...

"Using recent matched employer-employee data from the manufacturing sector in 20 Sub-Saharan African countries, the authors analyze how the supply of skills and legal origin of the country affect the wage setting process. The wage analysis yields three main findings. First, increasing returns to...

"The author studies the determinants of total factor productivity (TFP) for manufacturing firms in Bangladesh using data from a recent survey. She obtains TFP measures by making use of firm-specific deflators for output and inputs. Controlling for industry, location, and year fixed effects, she...