This paper explores the relationship between the regional business environment, lagging regions, and firm performance in four European countries: Italy, Poland, Romania, and Spain. It combines firm-level data from Orbis measuring sales, employment, productivity, and profitability, with...

Global value chains have altered the nature of global trade and offer significant opportunities for developing countries to expand exports, access technology, and raise productivity. Policy makers rightly seek to understand what it takes to participate in global value chains. In practice, this...

Transport and logistics infrastructure is a critical determinant of the competitiveness of a country's producers and exporters. Well-functioning transport and logistics infrastructure relies not just on hardware, but critically on the operating environment that emerges from the interaction...

Using highly disaggregated firm-level customs transaction data for imports and exports in Peru over the 2000–2012 period, this paper explores the relationship between imports of intermediate inputs and firm export performance. The paper shows that greater use, variety, and quality of imported...

Deeper regional integration can be beneficial especially for regions along international borders. It can open up new markets on opposite sides of borders and give consumers wider access to cheaper goods. This paper uses data from five contiguous districts of India, Nepal, and Bangladesh in the...

Can countries reorient their productive capacity to become more environmentally friendly and inclusive? To investigate this question, this paper uses a standard input-output modeling framework and data from 141 countries and regions to construct a new global data set of employment, value-added,...

Using a cross-section of more than 25,000 domestic manufacturing firms in 78 low and middle-income countries from the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys, this paper assesses how mediating factors influence intra-industry productivity spillovers to domestic firms from foreign direct investment. It...