Manufacturers in India are increasingly selling services-a phenomenon referred to as servitization. Both the proportion of manufacturers selling services and the share of services in total revenue of manufacturers increased threefold between 1994 and 2013. More productive manufacturers and those...

Recent literature suggests that the positive impact of population density on wages, the canonical measure of agglomeration effects, is multiples higher in developing countries than in advanced economies. This poses an urban productivity puzzle because on-the-ground observations do not suggest...

Recent empirical work suggests that there are large agglomeration gains from working and living in developing country cities. These estimates find that doubling city size is associated with an increase in productivity by 19 percent in China, 12 percent in India, and 17 percent in Africa. These...

The spread of COVID-19 has disrupted firm operations on a global scale. Using a comprehensive data set that observes over 3,000 firms in 16 countries, including several developing countries, shortly before and after the pandemic, we relate firms' structured management practices to post- COIVD-19...

High-growth firms have been widely studied in advanced countries, but little is known about such stellar performers in Africa. Using establishment-level data from Ethiopia, this paper finds that the incidence of high-growth firms stands at an average of 7 percent, a figure comparable to that of...

This paper examines whether a country's participation in global value chains supports spatial convergence in the domestic economy. In theory, production disintegration through "unbundling" makes industrial development less lumpy, providing opportunities for smaller cities to plug and play in...

Using three rounds of the World Bank's Business Pulse Surveys in South Asia, this paper quantifies the relationship between informality and firms' investment and employment decisions. Accounting for multidimensionality in definition and the margins of informality, the analysis suggests that...

Using three rounds of data from the Business Pulse Survey in South Asia, this paper studies the differential effects of the COVID-19 shock on informal firms. It also captures heterogeneity within informal firms based on the degree and motivation of informality. The findings suggest that the...