China has been the most successful developing country in this modern era of globalization. Since initiating economic reform after 1978, its economy has expanded at a steady rate over 8 percent per capita, fueling historically unprecedented poverty reduction (the poverty rate declined from over...

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...

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...

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...

Size, age, sector, and productivity are commonly cited as factors determining a firm’s survival. However, there are several dimensions of the investment climate in which the firm operates that affect whether it continues in business or exits. This paper uses new panel data from 27 Eastern...

In the past decade, the World Bank has promoted improving business environments as a key strategy for development, which has resulted in a significant amount of investment in collecting firm-level investment climate surveys across countries. What lessons have emerged from the papers using these...

This paper provides an overview of the state of access to bank financing for SMEs in five Sub-Saharan African countries and analyzes the drivers behind banks'involvement with SMEs. The paper builds on data collected through five in-depth studies in Kenya, Nigeria, Rwanda, South Africa, and...

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 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...

The global financial crisis and the response to it have contributed to a sharp increase in public indebtedness in a large number of countries. While there have been episodes of high debt in the past, there are a number of long-term challenges today that are likely to complicate the...