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,...

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...

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...

The decline in cash revenue in Russia has been the key macroeconomic policy failure of the transition. During 1994–98, a sharp deterioration in cash compliance was offset by a rise in non-cash revenue, as the government increasingly financed its spending through mutual arrears write-offs. This...

Many developing countries now actively solicit foreign investment, offering firms subsidies, tax holidays, and exemptions from import duties. One justification for subsidizing these firms is the so-called spillover of technology from foreign to domestic firms. Using panel data -- following more...

In the past few years, there has been a large increase in portfolio capital flows into emerging markets, mostly fueled by mutual funds and other institutional investors. Based on a simple variance ratio test, this paper finds that emerging stock markets as a group experienced a sharp increase in...

The decline in cash revenue in Russia has been the key macroeconomic policy failure of the transition. During 1994-98, a sharp deterioration in cash compliance was offset by a rise in non-cash revenue, as the government increasingly financed its spending through mutual arrears write-offs. This...