This paper discusses the constraints for private equity financing of small and medium enterprises in developing economies. In addition to capital, private equity investors bring knowledge and expertise to the companies in which they invest. Through active participation on the board of directors...

This paper studies the impact of a program that provides grants for technical assistance on the interest rates and outreach of credit unions in Mexico. Credit unions financing rural borrowers received grants in different years. The study uses propensity score matching and relies additionally on...

This paper discusses a randomized control trial to measure the short-term impacts of a skills intervention among urban youth in Sierra Leone at the onset of the Ebola crisis. The intervention provided (i) technical skills training, plus on-the-job training; (ii) business skills training; and...

This paper presents findings from the impact evaluation of the Economic Empowerment of Adolescent Girls and Young Women (EPAG) project in Liberia. The EPAG project was launched by the Liberian Ministry of Gender and Development in 2009 with the goal of increasing the employment and income of...

This study evaluates the employment effects of a publicly-run national technical vocational education training program in Brazil that explicitly takes input from firms in determining the location, scale, and skill content of courses offered. Using exogenous course capacity restrictions, the...

The authors address the economic impact of the labor force training program (PAFPA) developed for the informal sector in C?te d'Ivoire. The data contain a subsample of the participants in the agricultural sector, tailoring sector, and the electronics sector, and a comparable control group of...

This paper addresses the economic impact of the labor force training program (PAFPA) developed for the informal sector in Cote d'Ivoire. The data contain a subsample of the participants in the agricultural sector, tailoring sector, and the electronics sector and a comparable control group of...

There is frequent public and media concern over the cost of bloated cabinets in many Sub-Saharan African countries. Scholarship on elite clientelism links cabinet positions with corruption and practices that undermine sound policy making. This paper presents new data on the number of ministers...

In the post-global financial crisis period, the financing of countercyclical policies led not only to a reduction in the fiscal surpluses across Sub-Saharan African countries, but also an increase in their levels of indebtedness. Although public debt for the region in 2018 was still below that...

This paper examines systematically the growth effects of trade integration in Sub-Saharan Africa. It complements and improves upon the empirical literature in two aspects: first, it jointly estimates the impact of different dimensions of trade integration, namely, trade volumes, export/trade...