This paper examines two sources of global knowledge spillovers: foreign direct investments and trade. Empirical evidence demonstrates that foreign direct investment and trade can contribute to overall domestic productivity growth only when the technology gap between domestic and foreign firms is...

This paper applies the Growth Identification and Facilitation Framework developed by Lin and Monga (2010) to Nigeria. It identifies as appropriate comparator countries China, India, Indonesia, and Vietnam, and selects a wide range of industries in which these comparator countries may be losing...

Africa's economic performance has been widely viewed with pessimism. In this paper, firm-level data for around 80 countries are used to examine formal firm performance. Without controls, manufacturing African firms perform significantly worse than firms in other regions. They have lower...

This paper provides a systematic, empirical assessment of the impact of infrastructure quality on the total factor productivity (TFP) of African manufacturing firms. This measure is understood to include quality in the provision of customs clearance, energy, water, sanitation, transportation,...

This paper is about micro foundations of productivity and growth. There are several studies on productivity for advanced economies but relatively few for developing countries. Using data from the investment climate surveys of the World Bank, estimation results from 45 developing countries,...

How important is firm turnover to national productivity growth? The literature points to the contribution of creative destruction being strongest in more developed countries or where market institutions are strongest. This paper looks at the case of Morocco, spanning 16 years, during which...

This paper tests a neo-Schumpeterian model with industry-level data to analyze how Brazil, India, and China are catching up with South Korea’s technological frontier in a globalized world. The paper validates Aghion et al.’s inverted-U hypothesis that industries that are closer to the...

This paper studies how liberalization affects productivity growth using micro-level plant data. While previous studies have already shown the existence of a positive relationship between competition and economic performance, the novelty of this paper is that it analyzes not only the average...

This paper presents new evidence on the causal links between changes in the business environment and firm productivity growth. It contributes to the literature in three important aspects. First, it constructs a unique database merging information from two large firm-level databases. The samples...

The paper presents empirical analysis of a panel of countries to estimate an agricultural production function using a measure of capital in agriculture absent from most studies. The authors employ a heterogeneous technology framework where implemented technology is chosen jointly with inputs to...