Whilst the variety of search activities promotes innovation, there is a central tension between a firm's potential benefits from wide and diverse search activities and its ability to reap these potential benefits. In this paper, we argue that the potential and realised benefits from a firm'...

While it is intuitively convincing that neighbourhood characteristics add up to an important location factor, knowledge about the benefits that individual firms and entrepreneurs can draw from neighbourhood-oriented policy is still limited. This article contributes to the discussion by...

This paper outlines some of the issues that affect small and medium sized enterprises (SMEs) in three areas: regulation, procurement, and dispute resolution. The work presented herein is part of the Bank's most recent efforts to develop new approaches and instruments to strengthen its role as a...

This paper proposes a conceptual framework for understanding and analyzing how business regulations affect small and microenterprises. In doing so, it also makes a case for why particular attention should be paid to the process of initial registration of businesses and why this is a promising...

This report presents the results of a comparative study of entrepreneurship in Latin America and East Asia. It focuses on the process of creation of new companies. That process is analyzed at three different stages: inception of the entrepreneurial venture, company start-up, and its early...

This presentation gives an overview of business development, competiveness and innovation in Jamaica. Fical and financial incentives, other types of incentives and support systems are discussed as the way forward for improving the Science and Technology field. The presentation details that...

The IDB Group, guided by its Strategy for Microenterprise Development, has made the creation of a sustainable market of services to the sector one of its most important priorities during the past decade. This report presents an overview of the contributions the IDB has made to the...

A functional weakness of the training market is the extreme difficulty with which potential purchasers of "training" can gauge the quality of training programs in advance of payment. However, no training provider would allow a customer to delay payment of course fees until the course has been...

This document describes the efforts of the Department of Labor of Rio de Janeiro to build a comprehensive institutional framework focused on the promotion of a long run, micro-firm based local economic development model and to create a path to sustainable economic growth, job creation and...