Firms often cite financing constraints as one of their primary obstacles to investment. Global capital flows, by bringing in scarce capital, may ease the financing constraints of host country firms. But if incoming foreign investors borrow heavily from domestic banks, foreign direct investment...

Manufacturing has made an important contribution to raising living standards in many parts of the world. Concerns about premature deindustrialization have made some observers skeptical about the potential for manufacturing to play this role in Africa. But employment in African manufacturing has...

The authors identifies a new set of stylized facts on the 2008-2009 trade collapse that they hope can be used to shed light on the importance of demand and supply-side factors in explaining the fall in trade. In particular, they decompose the fall in international trade into product entry and...

The authors investigate how institutions affect productivity spillovers from foreign direct investment (FDI) to China's domestic industrial enterprises during 1998-2007. They examine three institutional features that comprise aspects of China's "special characteristics": (1) the different...

This explores the impact of a tax reform in some provinces of China which eliminated the value-added tax on some investment goods. While the goal of the experiment was to encourage upgrading of technology, the results suggest that there was no evident increase overall in fixed investment, and...

The aim of this paper is twofold. First, it documents the changing global landscape before and after the crisis, emphasizing the shift towards multipolarity. In particular, it emphasizes the ascent of developing countries in the global economy before, during, and after the crisis. Second, it...

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,...

Recent trade theory emphasizes the role of market-share reallocations across firms (“stealing”) in driving productivity growth, whereas previous literature focused on average productivity improvements (“learning”). We use comprehensive, firm-level data from India’s organized...

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...

Africa's economic performance has been widely viewed with pessimism. In this paper, firm-level data for around 80 countries are used to examine formal firm performance. Without controls, manufacturing African firms perform significantly worse than firms in other regions. They have lower...