Private sector assessments provide information and analysis essential to formulating strategies for alleviating constraints on private sector development. They are meant to contribute both to the Bank's policy dialogue with borrowing governments and to the formulation of country assistance...

In most developing countries, capital markets are relatively undeveloped and banks are often unable or unwilling to undertake term lending. And banks prefer to lend to larger, established business with well-developed balance sheets and credit histories. Operations in microenterprises and small...

The authors investigate how a country's financial institutions and the quality of its legal system explain the size attained by its largest industrial firms in a sample of 44 countries. Firm size is positively related to the size of the banking system and the efficiency of the legal system....

The authors assess Thailand's policy options for reducing large corporations'vulnerability to economic shocks and improving their corporate governance - and for providing smaller firms a more stable funding structure. Using data for firms listed on Thailand's stock exchange, they empirically...

The authors analyze whether form of ownership affects the substitutability of internal and external sources of finance. In particular, they test whether financial constraints are more severe for independent firms, and whether members of large national business groups suffer different constraints...

The author presents an analysis of the finances of Egyptian listed companies evaluating recent trends in growth and profitability during the 1995-2001 period. The data from financial statements reveal the effect of the economic slowing of the past few years, especially in the construction and...

As cities in developing countries grow, the need to meet increasing demand for urban infrastructure services has become an important policy problem. Failure to respond adequately affects productivity and the quality of life in those cities. In order to make the Bank's lending programs in this...

How does the preferred entry mode of foreign investors depend on their technological capability relative to that of their rivals? The authors develop a simple model of entry mode choice and evaluate its main testable implication using data on foreign investors in Eastern European countries and...

Firm-level data for the Czech Republic (1992-96) suggest that foreign investments had a positive impact on recipient firms'total factor productivity (TFP) growth. This result is robust to corrections for the sample-selection bias that prevails because foreign investment tends to go to firms with...

The authors use a firm-level panel data set from Romania to examine whether the nationality of foreign investors affects the degree of vertical spillovers from foreign direct investment. Investors'country of origin may matter for spillovers to domestic producers in upstream sectors (supplying...