The rapid review confirms that Pacific Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are socially, culturally, and environmentally diverse, with some features in common, and which collectively make them unique to other regions of the world: Small island countries have uniquely fragile water resources...

Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) face significant financing gaps that stifle innovation and economic growth. The credit gap alone is estimated at dollar 4.5 trillion as of 2017 for emerging markets and developing economies (EMDEs) only. Bank financing has been the traditional source of...

An effective legal and regulatory framework is essential in order to attract private investment into the telecommunications sector of most transitional and developing (TDCs) and to ensure that the TDC has the best chance of achieving the benefits for the country as a whole that flow from a...

Chapter 1 of this paper argues that punlic sector resources in developing countries are insufficient to finance demand for investment in increasingly integrated infrastructure services. Chapter 2 discusses the role of reforms in public enterprises providing infrastructure services. Chapter 3...

John Van Reenen sketches the evolution of CEP research on the drivers of productivity growth - and its impact on policies to foster competition.

Economists have long puzzled over the astounding differences in productivity between firms and countries. For example, looking at disaggregated data on U.S. manufacturing industries, Syverson (2004a) found that plants at the 90th percentile produced four times as much as the plant in the 10th...

A classic question in industrial organization is whether competition raises productivity and if so, through what mechanism? I discuss recent empirical evidence from both large-scale databases and specific industries which suggests that tougher competition does indeed raise productivity and one...

A long-standing question in social science is to what extent differences in management cause differences in firm performance. To investigate this we ran a management field experiment on large Indian textile firms. We provided free consulting on modern management practices to a randomly chosen...