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 provides the results of an international survey of practitioners with experience in facilitating the participation of African smallholder farmers in supply chains for higher-value and/or differentiated agricultural products. It explores their perceptions about the constraints...

Industrial parks are as popular as they are controversial, in India and globally. At their best they align infrastructure provision and agglomeration economies to jolt industrial growth. More often, they generate negative spill-overs, provide handouts, sit empty, or simply do not get built. This...

This paper analyzes annual accounting data for a sample of 5,000 publicly traded manufacturing firms from Germany, France, Italy, Japan, and the United Kingdom. The analysis uses data from 1997 to 2011 and finds an increasing trend of excess savings (defined as the difference between gross...

Cambodia's growth over 1998-2008 has been remarkable (almost 10 percent per annum for a decade). This paper applies a"growth diagnostic"approach to understand how this happened and how it can be sustained. Past growth has been driven by the coincidence of a set of historical and geographic...

The informal sector is typically characterized as being very heterogeneous and possibly composed of two clearly distinct segments, sometimes called the lower and upper tier. However, empirical evidence shows that even among lower tier entrepreneur's profitability can be quite high. The authors...

Combining multi-year, firm-level surveys with country-level panel data for 53 countries, the authors explore the impact of bank competition on firms'access to finance. They find that low competition, as measured by high values of the Lerner index, diminishes firms'access to finance, while...

This paper reviews the literature on the role of the investment climate reforms in job creation. It finds that the current landscape of employment and private sector activity in developing countries indicates a number of potential channels through which investment climate reforms can positively...

The aim of this paper is to provide an updated survey of the"state of the art"in entrepreneurial studies with a particular focus on developing countries (DCs). In particular, the concept of"entrepreneurship"is critically discussed, followed by a discussion of the institutional, macroeconomic,...

Firms in developing countries face numerous and serious constraints on their growth, ranging from corruption to lack of infrastructure to inability to access finance. Countries lack the resources to remove all the constraints at once and so would be better off removing the most binding one...