Africa's economic performance has been widely viewed with pessimism. This paper uses firm-level data for 89 countries to examine formal firm performance. Without controls, manufacturing African firms do not perform much worse than firms in other regions. But they do have structural problems,...

China's size, rapid growth, external openness, and trade performance have led to varying perceptions among the countries of Latin America: Is China a potential new market, a potent new competitor, or both? This book assesses the near-term strategic implications of China's economic performance...

China's size, rapid growth, external openness, and trade performance have led to varying perceptions among the countries of Latin America: Is China a potential new market, a potent new competitor, or both? This book assesses the near-term strategic implications of China's economic performance...

Recent trade theory emphasizes the role of market-share reallocations across firms ("stealing") in driving productivity growth, while the older literature focused on average productivity improvements ("learning"). The authors use comprehensive, firm-level data from India's organized...

In this paper, we disentangle the sources of public sector inefficiency using 1981-1995 panel data on manufacturing firms in Indonesia. We consider two leading hypotheses: (1) public sector enterprises are inefficient due to agency-type problems or (2) public sector enterprises are inefficient...

"Building on Eaton and Kortum's (2002) model of Ricardian trade, Alvarez and Lucas (2005) calculate that a small country representing 1% of the world's GDP experiences a gain of 41% as it goes from autarky to frictionless trade with the rest of the world. But the gains from openness, which...