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...

Martin Ravallion ("Why Don't We See Poverty Convergence?" American Economic Review, 102(1): 504-23; 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 this paper, we address in more detail the question raised in Wacker (2011b): why does foreign direct investment (FDI) generally have a positive impact on developing countries' terms of trade except in the case of South Asia? After arguing that such a negative relationship is generally...

I use the STAN database of the OECD and different econometric methods to investigate the effects of exports towards the EU-15 on wages in the Visegrad countries (CEEC-4; Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia). The results do not allow to draw any definite statements about this effect....

In this paper we investigate whether better information about the macroeconomic environment of an economy has a positive impact on its capital inflows, namely portfolio and foreign direct investment (FDI). The purpose of our study is to explicitly quantify information asymmetries by compliance...

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, eds. (2016) and Araujo, Vostroknutova, Brueckner, Clavijo, and Wacker (2016). In doing...

Ethiopia has experienced a growth acceleration over the past decade on the back of an economic strategy emphasizing public infrastructure investment and supported by heterodox macro-financial policies. To analyze the country’s growth performance during 2000–13, the paper employs a...