This paper examines the importance of competition in the growth and development of firms. We make use of the large-scale natural experiment of the shift from an economic system without competition to a market economy to shed light on the factors that influence innovation by firms and their...

This paper uses a survey of 3,300 firms in 25 transition countries to shed light on the factors that influence restructuring by firms and their subsequent performance as measured by growth in sales and in sales per employee over a three-year period. We begin by surveying what a decade of...

The literature on aid effectiveness has focused more on recipient policies than the determinants of aid allocation yet a consistent result is that political allies obtain more aid from donors than non-allies. This paper shows that aid allocated to political allies is ineffective for growth,...

This paper explores the role of industrial clusters in the development of the Egyptian universities & research institutes (URIs), and economic performance. The study hypothesizes that the large industrial clusters in Egypt are old and traditional, and have weak impact on URIs, and economic...

This paper investigates water use in a rural village in semi-arid of Darfur region. Water use is viewed from the perspective of four production sectors: agriculture, rural industry, trade and services as well as domestic: drinking, cooking and sanitary uses. Water for these uses may be from...

Using a 10-year panel survey covering Vietnamese manufacturing firms, we consistently obtain firm-specific mark-up estimates and relate these to firm-level formality. The average firm-specific mark-up using a trans-log revenue production function specification is estimated to be 1,445, with...

This paper estimates the factors affecting Vietnamese small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) listed on the Hanoi Stock Exchange and the Chi Minh City Stock Exchange between 2009 and 2019. The author adopts a quantitative method (the "Generalized Method of Moments"-GMM) to investigate six...