Across the globe, women often face lower income opportunities relative to men. Many of the dierences in economic outcomes can be explained by the sectors in which women tend to operate. Structural factors also contribute to the gender gap in economic opportunities. Mexican women who cross over...

The latest note tests two different approaches to improving management, and finds a novel group-based approach to be more cost-effective than the standard approach of providing consulting to individual firms

Standard business training programs aim to boost the incomes of the millions of self-employed business owners in developing countries, by teaching accounting, marketing and other basic business skills. However, research shows limited impacts of this traditional business training approach....

Relying on a novel dataset covering more than 120,000 firms in 60 countries, this paper con-tributes to the debate about D policies to support businesses through the COVID-19 pandemic. While governments around the world have implemented a wide range of policy support measures, evidence on the...

This paper provides a comprehensive assessment of the short-term impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on businesses worldwide with a focus on developing countries. The results are based on a novel data set collected by the World Bank Group and several partner institutions in 51 countries covering...

Embedding management and operational practices survey in a broader firm capabilities survey, this report finds that: (i) relative to the rest of Croatia, an average firm in the lagging region of the country (Eastern Croatia) is only slightly behind in the adoption of structured management...

Embedding management and operational practices survey in a broader firm capabilities survey, this paper finds that an average firm in Croatia scores 0.532 on structured management practices, which is farther from the frontier (0.615 in the United States). This average, however, masks the wide...