EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Business reform outcomes: Why so different?

Petar Stankov and Aleksandar Vasilev

Journal of Policy Modeling, 2019, vol. 41, issue 6, 1109-1127

Abstract: Post-crisis policy making increasingly focuses on doing business reforms. We argue that the effects of those reforms will be different across countries. To understand the reasons for the reform outcome divergence, we advance a novel firm-size distribution (FSDs) argument. At the center of the argument is the fact that FSDs are different across countries and stable over time. Then, if a given doing business reform induces firms of different size to grow differently, this will produce a variety of reform outcomes across countries. To advance the argument, we set up a tractable general equilibrium (GE) model and study how firms of different size grow after a doing business reform. The model predicts that larger firms will grow faster than smaller firms after the reform. The model predictions are tested on the Enterprise Surveys (ES) data, merged with the Doing Business indicators. We confirm that firms of different size grow differently after a Doing Business reform. Thus, based on the notable differences of firm size distributions across countries, identical reforms to start, operate and close a business will produce a variety of reform outcomes across countries.

Keywords: Reform-growth puzzle; Doing business reforms; Firm size (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D21 D22 D58 E02 L11 L25 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2019
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (1)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0161893819300559
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:jpolmo:v:41:y:2019:i:6:p:1109-1127

DOI: 10.1016/j.jpolmod.2019.04.003

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Policy Modeling is currently edited by A. M. Costa

More articles in Journal of Policy Modeling from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().

 
Page updated 2025-03-23
Handle: RePEc:eee:jpolmo:v:41:y:2019:i:6:p:1109-1127