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International audience; This paper explores the impact of foreign aid on firm growth for a panel of 4355 firms in 29 developing countries, 11 of which are in Africa. Using the World Bank Enterprise Surveys data and controlling for firm fixed effects, we find a positive impact of foreign aid on firms' sales growth. This result is robust to several checks, notably to the instrumentation of aid and to estimations on various sub-samples and on an extended cross-section sample of 93 countries. We then provide evidence that the positive effect of aid is especially strong for firms operating in sectors that are intensive in infrastructure and external finance, suggesting that aid may improve firm performance through the alleviation of infrastructure and financing constraints in developing countries.

We examine the impact of being located in areas with higher availability of electricity on manufacturing firm profits in Myanmar. Using a survey of 497 manufacturing firms conducted in 2014 and covering the whole territory of Myanmar, we investigate whether firms belonging to industries that tend to make more intensive use of electricity show better performance if such firms are located in areas with higher availability of electricity. We find that electricity provided by the national power grid tends to have a positive impact on manufacturing firm profits. Results are robust to reducing the sample to firms that could not have chosen their location endogenously, as well as to the use of an instrumental variable.

International audience; This study focuses on the impact financial development on the performance of firmsin countries with low financial development. Previous studies focusing on financial depth alone find thatfinancial development does not affect, or has a negative effect on, economic growth in developing countrieswith undersized financial systems. Using firm-level data in panel for a sample of 26 countries, we find thatthis hypothesis is invalidated if one takes into account not only financial depth but also financial inclusion,i.e.the distribution of access to financial services. Contrary to developed countries where financial inclusionis nearly universal, differences in access to credit among firms help explaining differences in firms perfor-mance. We measure financial inclusion as the share of firms who have access to bank overdraft facilities, or,alternatively, to any external source of financing, at the sectoral level. We find that whereas financial devel-opment does not affect firm performance on average, financial inclusion has a positive effect on firms growth.Where financial inclusion is low, financial development may create crowding out effects in favor of a minorityof firms or government that phase out or reverse its expected positive effects of financial development ongrowth. Additional testing show that these effects affect all firms, irrespective of size, or whether they haveaccess to bank credit or not. We interpret these results as showing that financial deepening increases firmsgrowth only if it widely distributed among firms, i. e. financial inclusion is high.

The purpose of this paper is to examine what kind of global measures may be efficiently implemented to help the developing countries to face price shocks, avoiding the past failures, which needs to take into account the long term trend of the markets. Firstly, we recall the nature of the vulnerability to price shocks: this legitimates to make the dampening of these shocks a reasonable goal for the development cooperation policy. Then, we consider the rationality of some international schemes of insurance or of guarantee which could be implemented through international assistance for countries facing price shocks: this assistance should be provided on a macroeconomic level, in particular through debt management, and on a microeconomic level, for instance through an insurance for the producers. The general principle underlying our proposals is that international assistance can enable developing countries to face price shocks, while taking into account the market signals, by offering a guarantee to these countries provided they respect some management rules.