Using a unique firm-level survey data base, covering fifty four countries, the authors investigate whether different financial, legal, and corruption issues that firms report as constraints, actually affect their growth rates. The results show that the extent to which these factors constrain a firm's growth depends very much on its size, and that it is consistently the smallest firms that are most adversely affected by all these constraints. Firm growth is more affected by reported constraints in countries with underdeveloped financial, and legal systems, and higher corruption. So, policy measures to improve financial, and legal development, and reduce corruption are well justified in promoting firm growth, particularly the development of the small, and medium enterprise sector. But the evidence also shows that the intuitive descriptors of an "efficient" legal system, are not correlated with the components of the general legal constraints that predict firm growth. This finding suggests that the mechanism by which the legal system affects firm performance, is not well understood. The authors' findings also provide evidence that the corruption of bank officials, constraints firm growth. This "institutional failure" should be taken into account, when modeling the monitoring role of financial institutions in overcoming market failures due to informational asymmetries.

As emphasized by Hausmann, Rodrik and Velasco, the policy challenge of boosting growth requires prioritization and identifying what are the most binding constraints. This paper draws on firm-level data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey, which suggests that the obstacles for the functioning of firms is related to firm size. Recognizing the potential endogeneity and simultaneity between firms' constraints and firm size, we implement an Ordered-Probit model with a potential categorical endogenous regressor to estimate, for the case of Bolivia, the conditional probability of facing obstacles given the firm size category, while controlling for other factors. The results confirm the importance of allowing for the roles of firm size in identifying constraints and suggest priorities for policies to remove constraints to economic performance.

Research into firm growth has been accumulating at a terrific pace, and Alex Coad s survey of this multifaceted field provides a detailed, comprehensive overview of the latest developments. Much progress has been made in empirical research into firm growth in recent decades due to factors such as the availability of detailed longitudinal datasets, more powerful computers and new econometric techniques. This book provides an up-to-date catalogue of empirical work, as well as a coherent theoretical structure within which these new results can be interpreted and understood. It brings together a large body of recent research on firm growth from a multidisciplinary perspective, providing an up-to-date synthesis of stylized facts and empirical regularities. Numerous empirical findings and theories of firm growth are also surveyed and compared in order to evaluate their validity. Drawing on a vast and diverse body of research, this book will prove invaluable to students, academics, policy makers and practitioners with a need to keep abreast of studies in industrial organization, firm growth and management.

What role does the business environment play in promoting and restraining firm growth? Recent literature points to a number of factors as obstacles to growth. Inefficient functioning of financial markets, inadequate security and enforcement of property rights, poor provision of infrastructure, inefficient regulation and taxation, and broader governance features such as corruption and macroeconomic stability are discussed without any comparative evidence on their ordering. In this paper, the authors use firm level survey data to present evidence on the relative importance of different features of the business environment. They find that although firms report many obstacles to growth, not all the obstacles are equally constraining. Some affect firm growth only indirectly through their influence on other obstacles, or not at all. Using Directed Acyclic Graph methodology as well as regressions, the authors find that only obstacles related to finance, crime, and political instability directly affect the growth rate of firms. Robustness tests further show that the finance result is the most robust of the three. These results have important policy implications for the priority of reform efforts. They show that maintaining political stability, keeping crime under control, and undertaking financial sector reforms to relax financing constraints are likely to be the most effective routes to promote firm growth.