Export promotion agencies provide exporters with a broad range of services, going from counseling to sponsoring their participation in international trade missions and fairs. These services may have heterogeneous effects and thus contribute differently to achieve the goals of these...

In recent years, microfinance has greatly expanded the outreach of the financial system to millions of households in the Latin American and Caribbean region. The purpose of this report is to offer an updated snapshot of access to financial services in the region. The approach is two-fold. In the...

Information problems involved in trading differentiated goods are a priori acuter than those associated with trading more homogeneous products. The impact of export promotion activities intending to address these problems can be therefore expected to differ across goods with different degree of...

Entering new export markets is primarily a discrete choice. Even though several empirical papers have used modeling strategies consistent with this fact, no study has examined the effects of public policies aimed at affecting this decision within this setting. In this paper we assess the impact...

Several countries have implemented programs to support their firms¿ internationalization efforts. Their impacts are likely to be heterogeneous over firm size categories because these programs are primarily intended and expected to benefit smaller companies. Whether this is or not the case is...

The current study gathers together a large database on the funding side of Latin American microfinance institutions (MFIs), providing detailed coverage of 61 regulated MFIs in nine Latin American countries with major microfinance markets. The study goes on to examine the relative costs of the...

This presentation gives an overview of business development, competiveness and innovation in Jamaica. Fical and financial incentives, other types of incentives and support systems are discussed as the way forward for improving the Science and Technology field. The presentation details that...

The IDB Group, guided by its Strategy for Microenterprise Development, has made the creation of a sustainable market of services to the sector one of its most important priorities during the past decade. This report presents an overview of the contributions the IDB has made to the...

A functional weakness of the training market is the extreme difficulty with which potential purchasers of "training" can gauge the quality of training programs in advance of payment. However, no training provider would allow a customer to delay payment of course fees until the course has been...

This document describes the efforts of the Department of Labor of Rio de Janeiro to build a comprehensive institutional framework focused on the promotion of a long run, micro-firm based local economic development model and to create a path to sustainable economic growth, job creation and...