This study examines the relationship between firm characteristics and borrowing from commercial banks by small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in the People's Republic of China (PRC) and five Southeast Asian economies (Indonesia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Thailand, and Viet Nam). Analysis...

This study sheds light on small and medium-sized enterprise (SME) financing and its performance in Thailand. It elaborates on the key sources of finance existing for Thai manufacturing SMEs and their importance for SME performance as measured by technical efficiency, export performance, and...

This study investigates the impact of internal and external research and development (R&D) on the innovation performance of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) in India and Pakistan. Micro-level data was obtained for 3,492 Indian and 696 Pakistani SMEs from the World Bank's Enterprise...

Policies for stimulating technological development and innovation in small and medium-sized enterprises can be divided into three groups. Supply-side policies aim at increasing firms' incentives to invest in innovation by reducing costs. Demand-side policies are public actions to induce...

The paper analyzes the link between human capital and firm-level productivity in five Asian countries. It draws on a dataset of over 4,000 enterprises and considers both the prior educational attainment of workers and in-service training programs of enterprises. Differences between small,...

This paper examines the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on domestic innovation based on a data set covering the pharmaceutical industries across 29 provinces in the People's Republic of China (PRC) over the period 1998-2007. We show that there is a negative horizontal spillover effect...

This paper examines the foreign direct investment (FDI) spillover effects from foreign to domestic firms in Indonesia and assesses the significance of geographical factors on FDI spillover. It uses firm-level data from the Indonesian Bureau of Public Statistics (BPS) covering the period from...

The Russian invasion of Ukraine disrupted a V-shaped economic post-pandemic recovery in Central and West Asia. It affected global supply chains and slowed the region's growth momentum while adding inflationary pressures. Private businesses were adversely affected by the impact of the invasion...

This study empirically investigated the factors affecting firms' ability to adjust production in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. This study used firm-level survey data from the Enterprise Survey implemented by the World Bank Group, including a standard Enterprise Survey (Baseline) and two...

This study assesses the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on micro, small, and medium-sized enterprises (MSMEs) and the role of Fintech, in particular mobile financial services (MFS), in their recovery from COVID-induced losses. The study uses data from a survey of 216 MSMEs from Bangladesh Small...