The fourth in impact series follows up on the first impact note, which presented the puzzling finding that the average female-owned microenterprise in Sri Lanka had no gain in profit from grants. This note presents the results of new research designed to understand why

This new series is intended to share the findings of impact evaluations in the areas of finance and private sector development (FPD) that researchers in Finance and Private Sector Development Team of the Development Research Group (DECRG-FP) have been involved in, and to draw out their lessons...

In response to the financial and economic crisis, many countries sought to stimulate labor demand, facilitate job search and preserve skills, and protect income. While little information is available about the impact of these interventions, there is some evidence that they involved a substantial...

Informality is pervasive in many developing countries, where the majority of businesses do not register. One view, linked strongly with Hernando de Soto and the International Finance Corporations (IFC's) doing business project, is that the informal sector consists of potential entrepreneurs who...

Throughout the Middle East, unemployment rates of educated youth have been persistently high and female labor force participation, low. This paper studies the impact of a randomized experiment in Jordan designed to assist female community college graduates find employment. One randomly chosen...

The authors conduct a randomized experiment among women in urban Sri Lanka to measure the impact of the most commonly used business training course in developing countries, the Start-and-Improve Your Business program. They work with two representative groups of women: a random sample of women...

There has long been a concern among policymakers that too much of remittances are consumed and too little saved, limiting the development impact of migration. Financial literacy programs have become an increasingly popular way to try and address this issue, but to date there is no evidence that...

Business training programs are a popular policy option to try to improve the performance of enterprises around the world. The last few years have seen rapid growth in the number of evaluations of these programs in developing countries. This paper undertakes a critical review of these studies...

Matching grants are one of the most common policy instruments used by developing country governments to try to foster technological upgrading, innovation, exports, use of business development services and other activities leading to firm growth. However, since they involve subsidizing firms, the...

Lowering the cost of sending remittances has become a major goal of policy efforts in migration, and an area the World Bank has worked on across the globe. Two main channels for lowering these costs are regulatory reforms to promote competition and the introduction of new products; and efforts...