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Global value chain (GVC) participation is generally seen as an important avenue for developing countries to access new markets and diversify exports, to add value to local industries and to increase employment. For developing country firms it provides opportunities to access knowledge to enhance learning and capability building. However, many firms in developing countries do not directly integrate into GVCs but rather into regional value chains (RVCs) or local value chains (LVCs), as these have become increasingly important due to the emergence of “Southern”-end markets and increased South-South trade. In this paper we examine and compare the role of involvement in these different types of value chains in stimulating supplier learning in the context of the IT-enabled service (ITES) industry. We distinguish between different types of learning and argue that learning outcomes depend crucially on value chain governance: the power balance and interactions between the lead firms and suppliers. We draw on a survey among the population of ITES providers in South Africa. These novel firm level data allow for a study of learning mechanisms in value chains at the firm level, going beyond prior studies of aggregate level relationships. In a multivariate analysis, we find that service providers in GVCs learn via interactions with their client firms. Yet, GVC participation is not the only avenue for client learning and capability building; we similarly observe learning in LVCs and RVCs. Learning is generally and strongly enhanced by trust-based governance of the client-supplier relationship, while in GVCs, control-based governance additionally promotes learning specifically in the IT domain. These findings provide a better understanding of how firms in developing countries can build capabilities in local, regional and global value chains of services, a topic that has gained interest among development practitioners. ispartof: World Development vol:141 issue:2021 pages:1-10 status: Published online

Using unique innovation survey data collected among a homogenous sample of firms active in the textiles and apparel sector in Pakistan, this paper analyses the role of innovation for employment growth. In particular, it develops and tests the hypothesis that innovation is conducive to employment creation, and that this is especially the case for smaller and younger firms, supporting the hypothesis that young innovative companies grow faster by engaging in riskier and more radical innovation to catch up with incumbent firms. We find empirical evidence for these hypotheses, which is robust to different model specifications and estimation techniques and to different measures of innovation. Young innovative companies also perform well in absolute employment creation making them interesting targets from a policy perspective.

Most evidence on survey response effects is based in the Western world. We use data from two randomized experiments built into a nation-wide representative household survey in Tunisia to analyze the effects of framing and priming on responses to gender attitudes in the Arab context. Our first experiment shows that questions on attitudes towards decision-making power when framed in an equality frame reduce responses in favor of gender inequality. In our second experiment we find that responses to attitudes towards domestic violence are susceptible to an audio primer. Oral statistical information about the incidence of domestic violence in Tunisia increases disapproval of domestic violence among the male subsample further, but does not affect women. In terms of impact heterogeneity, we find mixed results for treatment interventions interacting with the gender of the interviewer and the interviewer’s perceived religiosity.

This paper analyses the impact of International Standards Certification (ISC) on the export participation and the scale of exports of firms based in 89 developing or transition countries. We conceptualise ISC as an endogenous institutional advantage, which bridges institutional voids in the country and helps firms to export. The empirical results show that certified firms are more likely to export, and to export on a larger scale. The impact of ISC runs through two channels: productivity and transaction cost economies. We show that certification plays an important role in bringing down transaction costs in international markets, while also maintaining and raising efficiency. This finding is reinforced by additional evidence, suggesting that ISC matters more for the export participation of domestic firms than for foreign firms and is of greater importance for firms based in countries characterised by severe institutional voids.

Using recently collected firm-level data from Egypt and Tunisia, this paper explores the effect of institutional obstacles and corruption on the innovative behavior of firms and their effect on firms’ employment growth. We estimate the micro-level interactions between corruption and institutional obstacles and test the hypothesis that corruption ‘greases the wheels’ of firm performance when bureaucratic procedures are more severe and hampering innovation. Accounting for endogeneity and simultaneity, the paper uses a conditional recursive mixed-process model (CMP). The results show that corruption has a direct negative effect on the likelihood that a firm is an innovator, but a positive effect when interacted with institutional obstacles. This provides support for the hypothesis that corruption serves as a mechanism to bypass the bureaucratic obstacles related to obtaining the necessary business permits and licenses for product innovation. These effects also resonate into firm growth, through their effect on product innovation.

We provide evidence that both human capital and R&D increase the likelihood that a firm will be a high-growth firm in the industry. However, different from human capital, being an R&D active firm also increases the probability of substantial decline or failure, underscoring the risky nature of innovation. Quantile regression results show that, different from R&D, human capital is growth-enhancing for all firms, hence also those located in the lower quantiles of the distribution of growth rates across firms.

International audience; Relying on a structural nonparametric estimation, we show that co2 emissions clearly increase with income at low income levels. For higher income levels, we observe a decreasing relationship, though not significant. We also find that co2 emissions monotonically increases with energy use at a decreasing rate.; À l’aide d’une modélisation non paramétrique structurelle, nous montrons que les émissions de co2 augmentent clairement avec le revenu pour de faibles niveaux de revenus. Cette relation est décroissante bien que non significative pour des niveaux de revenu élevés. Nous observons également que les émissions de co2 augmentent de manière monotone, mais à un taux décroissant, avec la consommation d’énergie.

Using two waves (2013, 2015) of the Micro, Small, and Medium sized Enterprises (MSMEs) survey of Vietnamese manufacturing firms, this paper first explores what drives firms��� decision to have a domestic standards certificate, taking into account a rich number of factors related to the cost and expected benefits of certification as well as institutional factors. It further explores the presence of a positive and significant effect of domestic certificates on firm growth, testing whether these serve as signalling devices for desirable attributes under information asymmetry. Evidence is indeed found for a signalling effect of domestic standards certification, being stronger for female-run businesses. Results hold even when controlling for international certifications.