This book argues for the urgent need for countries to move forward aggressively on adopting and upgrading quality and standards. The focus is on developing countries, many of which are lagging in the race for standards adoption, and within that category, on middle-income countries. The book...

This report focuses not only on the gaps facing Latin America in both education and technology, but especially on the interactions between the two. The central premise of the report is that skills and technology interact in important ways, and this relationship is a fundamental reason for the...

In most developing and industrial countries, infrastructure services have traditionally been provided by government enterprises, but in developing countries at least, these enterprises have often proven to be inefficient, unable to provide much-needed investments, and manipulated to achieve...

Investment Climate surveys (ICs) are a recent instrument used by the World Bank to identify key obstacles to country competitiveness and to guide policy reforms and government interventions in developing countries. In this paper, panel data from four ICs of four South East Asian (SEA) countries...

This article evaluates the effect of the overdraft facility (or line of credit) policy by comparing a large sample of overdraft facilitated firms and matched non-overdraft facilitated firms from Eastern Europe at the sector level. The sample firms are compared with respect to rates of different...

This paper examines two sources of global knowledge spillovers: foreign direct investments and trade. Empirical evidence demonstrates that foreign direct investment and trade can contribute to overall domestic productivity growth only when the technology gap between domestic and foreign firms is...

Increasingly, entrepreneurship is being discussed and considered as a source of high economic growth and competitiveness. A conceptual process of creative construction that characterizes the dynamics between entrants and incumbents can prove quite useful to analyze the impact of countries'...

Investment climate Surveys are valuable instruments that improve our understanding of the economic, social, political, and institutional factors determining economic growth, particularly in emerging and transition economies. However, at the same time, they have to overcome some difficult issues...

This paper provides a systematic, empirical assessment of the impact of infrastructure quality on the total factor productivity (TFP) of African manufacturing firms. This measure is understood to include quality in the provision of customs clearance, energy, water, sanitation, transportation,...