"Previous research has documented weak, and sometimes conflicting, effects of legal quality on measures of firm debt. Using WorldScope data for 1,689 firms, as well as more detailed proprietary data for 315 firms across nine East Asian countries, the authors find that access to foreign financing...

"This paper analyzes characteristics of nonfarm enterprises, their employment growth patterns, and constraints in doing business in rural Tanzania. Using unique survey data, the authors describe a low-return sector struggling to compete in a difficult business environment. However, about...

"The authors examine whether financial development boosts the growth of small firms more than large firms and hence provides information on the mechanisms through which financial development fosters aggregate economic growth. They define an industry's technological firm size as the firm size...

Doing Business in 2005: Removing Obstacles to Growth is the second in a series of annual reports investigating the scope and manner of regulations that enhance business activity and those that constrain it. New quantitative indicators on business regulations and their enforcement can be compared...

Facilitating the growth of Small- and Medium-sized Enterprises (SMEs) is central to creating jobs for an underutilized and growing labor force in Turkey as SMEs account for 79 percent of jobs in Turkey. Creating jobs for Turkey's unemployed and for the rapidly growing labor force, though partly...

This report identifies several themes that cover both macroeconomic constraints as well as structural factors affecting small, medium, and micro enterprises (SMME) in South Africa. After the introduction, Chapter 2 continues to discuss firm demographics for the 800 SMME firms surveyed....

"The authors examine the effects of taxation on financing policy using the corporate tax reform in 2001 in Croatia as a natural experiment. Since the extant literature on tax effects on capital structure studies listed firms in developed countries, it is worth investigating whether the same...