This book presents but a few examples of the many Bank-financed productive activities carried out by the people of the region, and pays tribute to the women and men who, in their efforts to succeed, daily renew their hopes for a better future. In addition, the book pays tribute to the...

This document represents a contribution made by the Tripartite Committee comprising the Organization of American States (OAS), the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) to the fourth Ministerial Meeting of the Pathways to...

Globalization poses the imperative for firms to link with other actors and find new ways to interact and learn from the relationship. Employing original empirical evidence and featuring new case studies from Brazil, Chile, Mexico, and Nicaragua, Upgrading to Compete shows that the form of...

This publication analyzes the profile of entrepreneurs and how they create high-growth businesses in 13 countries in Latin America, East Asia and southern Europe. It also offers case studies of entrepreneurship development policies and programs in the Americas and Europe. The comparative...

This paper studies the effect of government-backed partial credit guarantees on firms' performance. These guarantees are automatically granted to firms without enough collateral in order to lift their credit constraints. We put together a panel, covering the period 1997-2007, that combines data...

Using firm level data on 70,000 enterprises in 107 countries, this paper finds important effects of access to finance, business regulations, corruption, and to a lesser extent, infrastructure bottlenecks in explaining patterns of job creation at the firm level. The paper focuses on how the...

This paper presents a conceptual framework for explaining Credit Unions (CUs) loan delinquency and profitability in developing countries. It also offers an empirical estimation for a unique sample of CUs in Latin America.

This paper analyzes the effectiveness of public credit lines in promoting the performances of Brazilian firms. We focus on the impact of the credit lines managed by BNDES and FINEP in fostering growth measured in terms of employment, labor productivity and export. For this purpose, we use a...

Free Trade Agreements (FTA) attract significant interest, but after these treaties are signed not all exporters use them. We provide a model of heterogeneous utilization, also developing a novel method to estimate treaty-utilization costs. We later apply the model to estimate the evolution...