This paper studies the relationship between Asia's economic engagements in Africa and individual African nations' participation in global value chains (GVC) over the past two decades. We find that while overall exports from Africa to Asia are still highly concentrated in resource-intensive...

Africa represents a small share of global production and trade, while hosting half of the extreme poor worldwide. To catch up with the rest of the world, there is no alternative: the continent needs to link its production and trade to the global economy to take advantage of unlimited demand and...

This paper estimates a dynamic business growth equation on a sample of small-scale manufacturers. The results suggest that excessive labor regulation, power shortages, and problems of access to finance are significant influences on industrial growth in India. The expected annual sales growth...

Why do firms choose to locate in the informal sector? Researchers often argue that the high cost of regulation prevents informal firms from becoming formal and productive. Our results point to a more nuanced story. Using data from surveys of microenterprises in South Africa, Namibia, Botswana,...

The author analyzes production and labor market data for a random selection of small to medium-size firms in Ethiopia to answer two questions: 1) Does a worker's marginal productivity increase with time in the labor market or with job security, as must be the case if on-the-job skill formation...

The authors'analysis of manufacturing plants sampled from India's major industrial centers shows large productivity gaps across cities. The gaps partly reflect differences in agglomeration economies and in market access. However, they are also explained to a greater extent by differences in the...

Analysis of firm-level panel data from three sub-Saharan African economies shows that exporting manufacturers have a total factor productivity premium of 11-28 percent. The data do not allow testing of whether these premiums are caused by selection of more efficient producers into exporting or...

An analysis of data on a sample of small-scale manufacturers shows that a business is less likely to survive and grows slower the smaller the average price-cost margin in the industry in which it operates. The probability of survival is also smaller in import competing industries. So is the mean...