The importance of a country's "investment climate" for economic growth has recently received much attention. A contribution of this paper is to address the general lack of appropriate data for measuring the investment climate and its effects. In this paper we use a new survey of 1500 Chinese...

Two data sets are used to study how country and firm characteristics affected firms' financial constraints and their likelihood of survival during the early phase of the recent global financial crisis in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, a region that was especially hard hit. The first data...