Paraguay has achieved positive employment outcomes over the last decade, reflecting more jobs and improved average job quality, which together contributed to significant poverty reduction. Firms played a major role in creating these jobs, especially formal jobs. It is important to understand how...

Drawing on a new set of nationally representative, internationally comparable household surveys, this paper provides an overview of key features of structural transformation-labor allocation and labor productivity-in four African economies. New, micro-based measures of sector labor allocation...

Data from the Groningen Growth and Development Center's Africa Sector Database and the Demographic and Health Surveys reveals that much of Africa's recent growth and poverty reduction has been associated with a substantive decline in the share of the labor force engaged in agriculture. This...

This paper studies the cross-country patterns of risky innovation and growth through the lens of international trade. It uses a simple theoretical framework of risky quality upgrading by firms under varying levels of financial development to derive two predictions. First, the mean rate of...

This paper explores the links between city competitiveness and air pollution and the business environment. Because competitive cities not only attract more productive firms, but also facilitate their business, the paper look at firm performance as a proxy for city competitiveness. It focuses on...

Armenia, Georgia, the Kyrgyz Republic, and Tajikistan have all experienced substantial out-migration of workers and an associated inflow of workers' remittances over the past two decades. These four countries have much higher human capital, as measured by the Human Capital Index, than is typical...

Using firm-level survey data on registered private firms collected by the World Bank's Enterprise Surveys, this paper compares the level of labor productivity in 22 upper-middle-income countries and 11 high-income countries for which comparable data are available. The results show that labor...

The formal private sector has a key role to play in fostering growth and reducing unemployment in South Africa-strengthening its performance is therefore critical. This paper looks at firm behaviour, firm entry and exit, job outcomes, and productivity dynamics using firm-level administrative...

This paper investigates the sources of growth in manufacturing productivity in Cote D'Ivoire, Ethiopia and Tanzania in comparison with the case of Bangladesh. Based on the analysis of establishment census data since the mid-1990s, it finds that reallocation of market share between firms...

This paper explores the impact of the adoption of information and communications technology on firm performance and labor market outcomes using a firm survey from the manufacturing sector in Argentina. The findings are that at the firm level adoption of information and communications technology...