Handling charges in Caribbean ports are two to three times higher than in similar ports in other regions of the world. In some cases, it costs significantly less to ship a container to Hong Kong SAR, China, or Europe than it does to ship to a neighboring island no more than 100 miles away. The...

Both formal, and informal loans matter in agriculture. But formal lenders provide much more in production lending, than do informal lenders, often at a higher cost than what they can recover. The Agricultural Development Bank of Pakistan (ADBP), for example, providing about 90 percent of formal...

Simultaneity of borrowing, withdrawal of savings, and loan defaults due to the pronounced seasonality of agriculture often leads to investment failure of rural financial institutions. Lack of borrowing leads to lack of in-come- and consumption-smoothing, and in turn, causes inefficient resource...

This paper studies the use of psychometric tests, which were designed by the Entrepreneurial Finance Lab as a tool to screen out high credit risk and potentially increase access to credit for small business owners in Peru. The analysis uses administrative data covering the period from June 2011...

The author brings together two of government's primary challenges: environmental protection, and taxation to generate revenues. If negative externalities can be reduced not only by changes in consumption patterns, but also by making each activity cleaner (abatement efforts), how shall...

What mechanisms most frequently transmit foreign technologies to developing country firms? Do these foreign technologies affect both productive efficiency and product quality in the recipient firms? Under what circumstances do firms pursue activities that give them access to foreign knowledge?...

Agricultural development is an essential engine of growth and poverty reduction, yet agricultural data suffer from poor quality and narrow sectoral focus. There are several reasons for this: (i) difficult-to-measure smallholder agriculture is prevalent in poor countries, (ii) agricultural data...