RT Generic
T1 Investment Climate Effects on Alternative Firm-Level Productivity Measures
A1 Escribano, Álvaro
A1 Guasch, J. Luis
A1 Pena, Jorge
A2 Universidad Carlos III de Madrid.  Departamento de Economía, 
AB Developing countries are increasingly concerned about improving country competitiveness and productivity. Investment Climate surveys (ICs) at the firm level, are becoming the standard way for the World Bank to identify key obstacles to country competitiveness. This paper develops a general to specific econometric methodology, based on firm level observable fixed effects that generate robust investment climate effects (elasticities) on total factor productivity (TFP). By robust IC elasticities on TFP we mean elasticity estimates with equal signs and of similar magnitudes for several competing TFP measures. We apply this econometric methodology to the IC survey of Costa Rica showing how robust the investment climate effects are for several measures of TFP when conditioning on relevant plant-level information that is usually unobserved. For the economic evaluation we estimate the marginal effects of each IC variable on TFP as well as their IC impacts on average TFP obtaining important economic differences. These IC estimates are obtained from five blocks of IC variables, (i) infrastructure, (ii) red tape, corruption and crime, (iii) finance and corporate governance, (iv) quality, innovation and labor skills and (v) other control variables, could be used as benchmarks to assess cross-country IC assessments of TFP.
SN 2340-5031
YR 2019
FD 2019-02
LK https://hdl.handle.net/10016/28639
UL https://hdl.handle.net/10016/28639
LA eng
NO Alvaro Escribano and JorgePena acknowledges funding from The World Bank. Alvaro Escribano acknowledge funding from theSpanish Ministry of Economy, Industry and Competitiveness (ECO2015-68715-R, ECO2016-00105-001),Consolidation Grant (#2006/04046/002), and Maria de Maeztu Grant (MDM 2014-0431).
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RD 16 jul. 2024