After 20 years of neglect by international donors, agriculture is now again in the headlines because higher food prices are increasing food insecurity and poverty. In the coming years it will be essential to increase food productivity and production in developing countries, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and with smallholders. This however requires finding viable solutions to a number of complex technical, institutional and policy issues including land markets, research on seeds and inputs; agricultural extension; credit; rural infrastructure; storage; connection to markets; rural nonfarm This paper is a product of the Research Support Unit, Development Economics. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world.
After 20 years of neglect by international donors, agriculture is now again in the headlines because higher food prices are increasing food insecurity and poverty. In the coming years it will be essential to increase food productivity and production in developing countries, especially in Sub-Saharan Africa and with smallholders. This however requires finding viable solutions to a number of complex technical, institutional and policy issues including land markets, research on seeds and inputs; agricultural extension; credit; rural infrastructure; storage; connection to markets; rural nonfarm This paper is a product of the Research Support Unit, Development Economics. It is part of a larger effort by the World Bank to provide open access to its research and make a contribution to development policy discussions around the world.
Many developing countries are unable to provide their industrial sectors with reliable electric power, with the result that many enterprises must contend with an insufficient and unreliable supply of electricity. Because of these constraints, enterprises often opt for self-generation of electricity even though it is widely considered a second-best solution. This paper develops a theoretical model of investment behavior in remedial infrastructure in the presence of physical constraints. It then illustrates the model's predictions using a large crosscountry sample of enterprises from the World Bank Enterprise Survey database. Electricity-intensive sectors in high-outage countries are characterized by a significantly lower share of small firms. JEL codes: H54, L94, L16 And God said, 'Let there be light' and there was light, but the Electricity Board said He would have to wait until Thursday to be connected.
The authors survey the recent literature which examines the impact of the business climate on productivity and growth in developing countries using enterprise surveys. Comparable enterprise surveys today cover more than 100,000 firms in 123 countries. The literature that has analyzed this data provides evidence that a good business climate favors growth by encouraging investment and higher productivity. Various infrastructure, finance, security, competition, and regulation variables have been shown to have a significant impact on enterprise performance. The authors state their motivation for their review by explaining why a disaggregated, firm-level analysis of the relationship between enterprise performance and business climate-as opposed to a more macroaggregate analysis-is important to gaining insights into these issues. They review the main findings of the empirical microliterature based on enterprise surveys and consider the robustness of the results. To conclude they put forward some ideas to advance research on business climate and growth, and they suggest possible improvements in survey design. JEL codes: L51, O47, O12 In recent years, an unprecedented data collection effort has yielded a set of comparable enterprise surveys covering more than 100,000 firms from 123 countries. As a result, a number of studies have started to analyze the impact of the business climate variables contained in these surveys on different dimensions of firm performance. The general aim of this literature is to generate policy prescriptions based on the identification of the main constraints facing firms. Although many of these studies identify relevant constraints, contradictory or fragile results are also found, pointing to some weaknesses in the methodology The World Bank Research Observer
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