This paper investigates which firms suffer from informal competition and highlights the role of access to finance in this context.We use cross-sectional data from the World Bank Enterprise Surveys covering 42,000 firms in 114 developing and transition countries for the period 2006 to 2011 and...

This paper explores the economic relationship between foreign direct investment to developing countries and the export prices of the latter, measured by terms of trade. It is first shown that economic theory suggests such a relationship for various reasons but is inconclusive about the direction...

Martin Ravallion ("Why Don't We See Poverty Convergence?" American Economic Review, 102(1): 504-523; 2012) presents evidence against the existence of poverty convergence in aggregate data despite the conditional convergence of per capita income levels and the close linkage between growth and...

In a complex global production landscape, the quest for measures of economic activity by multinational enterprises (MNEs) has become more pressing. Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) statistics, which capture financing aspects of MNEs, have often been used as a proxy for multinational production...

Misallocation of human capital across sectors can have substantial negative implications for aggregate output. So far, the literature examining this type of labor misallocation has assumed a Cobb-Douglas production function. Our paper departs from this assumption and instead considers more...

This paper brings together the main findings and policy implications of two recent World Bank regional reports on economic growth in Latin America and the Caribbean: Araujo, Vostroknutova, Wacker and Clavijo, editions. (2016) and Araujo, Vostroknutova, Brueckner, Clavijo, and Wacker (2016). In...

The Latin America and Caribbean (LAC) region has seen a decade of remarkable growth and income convergence. Growth has been a key driver for reducing poverty and boosting shared prosperity. It has been debated how much of this decade of growth has been driven by policy reforms and how much was...