We develop a general equilibrium model to assess the quantitative effects of the business environment, including regulation, crime, corruption, infrastructure and access to finance, on output and total factor productivity (TFP) for 30 Sub-Saharan African countries. The first four dimensions...

Africa is the poorest part of the world and it has the worst environment for long term business success by most standards. Empirical works normally find a negative correlation between income per worker and measures for poor business environment. This paper develops a general equilibrium model to...

Global flows of Official Development Assistance are large and there is a large literature devoted to testing the effectiveness of these large flows. While among the poorest and the top recipients of foreign aid, Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are usually left out in the aid effectiveness...

This paper uses survey data collected from Kalaymyo, a small urban city in North West Myanmar, to characterize firms and analyze the constraints limiting their growth. The level of firm ownership is very high but most firms are small, informal, operated out of the home, earning low income and...

Growth accounting exercises point to aggregate TFP dierences as the dominant source of the large cross-country income dierences. In this paper, I ask which sectors account for the aggregate TFP gap between rich and poor countries. Data limitations for developing countries have led researchers to...

We develop a general equilibrium model to assess the quantitative impact of distorting institutions and policies related to the poor business environment in 30 sub-Saharan African countries. A subset of the distortions - namely, regulation, crime, corruption, and poor infrastructure - is modeled...