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Using unique firm-level data for manufacturing sectors in Indonesia, we examine how political and economic connections of firms affect their access to finance. We identify the political connections of a particular firm by whether the government owns its shares, whether politicians are on its board of directors, and whether its highly-ranked manager knows any politician personally. We find that politically connected firms are more likely to be able to borrow from state-owned banks. Moreover, being connected to the government raises the probability of being able to borrow as much as needed without any credit constraint. The financial benefit from political connections is more prominent for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) than for large firms. Furthermore, the benefit mostly comes from personal connections with politicians, rather than more formal connections as measured by government ownership or politicians on the boards of directors.

This paper investigates the impacts of informational and motivational seminars on export promotion targeting small and medium enterprises in the traditional apparel and textile clusters in Vietnam. To control for biases due to self‐selection, we conducted a randomised controlled trial and invited randomly selected firms to participate in 1‐day seminars. Because only some of the invited firms participated in the seminars, we employ an instrumental variable approach in which the dummy variable for a random invitation is used as an instrument for quantifying the effects of participation. We find that seminar participants were more likely to sense the difficulties of the export procedures and were, on average, unlikely to start exporting in the short run. However, the seminars encouraged large firms, which possibly embody higher productivity and absorptive capacity, to start exporting shortly after the seminars. This effect was not sustained in the long term without additional stimuli. We have also identified spillover effects of participants on non‐participants through informal information networks within the cluster. Overall, the results suggest that the provision of information about export is useful only to adequately productive larger firms with a sufficient absorptive capacity.

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We report the importance of informal training in introducing new post-harvest technologies in rice farming through informal contacts by exploring answers from both in-residence extension workers ('key farmers') and ordinary farmers in rural Cambodia. We use survey data collected in Cambodian villages between December 2012 and January 2013. While in-residence extension workers are well motivated and informal training plays a crucial role, lack of an appropriate financial incentive for the key farmers might hamper the sustainability of the project. We also emphasize that any intervention for rural development must avoid social exclusion and nepotism.