Explaining Enterprise Performance in Developing Countries with Business Climate Survey Data

By J. Dethier, M. Hirn, Stéphane Straub. 2008

221 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper surveys the recent literature which examines the impact of business climate variables on productivity and growth in developing countries using enterprise surveys. Comparable enterprise surveys today cover some 70,000 firms in over 100 countries around the world. The literature that has analyzed this data provides evidence that a good business climate drives growth by encouraging investment and higher productivity. Various infrastructure, finance, security, competition and regulation variables have been shown to significantly impact firm performance. Section 1 of this paper outlines the theoretical framework that underpins the investment climate literature. Section 2 describes the available datasets and surveys the key findings of the empirical literature, first macroeconomic and then microeconomic studies. Particular attention is paid to the robustness of the reported results. Section 3 highlights important econometric issues common to this literature and suggests a research agenda and possible improvements in survey design.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Information Systems

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/76cc311fda3d18fc84f377d7bfaa73e206eff5ef

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Economics and Econometrics

1. Valentina Rollo
2. Jing You
3. Yuanyuan Wang
4. Caroline Paunov
5. Simona Mateut
6. Tao Yuan
7. Qianqian Huang

In Information Systems

1. Jing You
2. Yuanyuan Wang
3. Caroline Paunov
4. Tao Yuan
5. Qianqian Huang

Citations in the corpus

• Government Connections and Financial Constraints: Evidence from a Large Representative Sample of Chinese Firms (2013, unknown): “Firms in developing countries tend to face more severe financial constraints than those in developed countries, and their owners typically name financial constraints as one of their primary obstacles to investment (Dethier et al. 2011).”
• Has the Internet Fostered Inclusive Innovation in the Developing World (2016, background): “3 Dethier et al. (2011) provide a comprehensive review of the dataset and various papers that have used these data to explore various questions related to firms.”
• Corruption and firm growth: Evidence from China☆ (2012, methodology): “According to the comprehensive review conducted by Dethier et al. (2010) and L. Xu (2011), many other factors may also play a role in explaining rm performance, such as the rm age, the number of employees, industry type, capital stock, innovation and learning, openness in terms of both…”