Person:
Cusolito, Ana Paula
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
SME development,
Productivity and growth,
Firm innovation,
Firm dynamics,
Entrepreneurship,
Innovation,
Trade
Degrees
Departments
Finance, Competitiveness, and Innovation Global Practice
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
Ana Paula Cusolito is a Senior Economist currently working for the Finance, Competitiveness, and Innovation Global Practice. Her research interests and experience focus on firm-level productivity, innovation, entrepreneurship and trade. More recently, she has been involved in a number of experiments to evaluate programs aimed at promoting innovation and entrepreneurship. She has experience working mainly in the Europe & Central Asia and Latin America regions. Ana Paula’s work has been published at the Journal of Banking and Financial Economics, Journal of Development Economics, IZA Journal of Labor and Development, and Journal of Development Effectiveness. Before working at the World Bank, Ana Paula worked at the Inter-American Development Bank and Government of Argentina. Ana Paula has a Ph.D. in Economics from Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 24
-
Publication
Trade Policy Barriers : An Obstacle to Export Diversification in Eurasia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-05)Despite trade liberalization efforts made by Eurasian countries, the export structure of the region shows significant levels of concentration across export destinations. To shed light on this observation, this research analyzes trade policy barriers in Eurasia, East Asia and the Pacific, and the European Union. Using the most recent data from sources including the World Trade Organization, the United Nations, and the World Bank including the Overall Trade Restrictiveness Indices, the Services Trade Restrictions Database, and the Temporary Trade Barriers Database the role of tariffs, non-tariff measures, temporary trade barriers, trade agreements, and trade barriers in services are explored to explain the lack of diversification by destination. Several conclusions can be drawn from the analysis. First, China, Korea, and Japan, as well as the European Union, impose high levels of protection on products of animal origin, which may explain the lack of Eurasian export diversification toward the East Asia and the Pacific and the European Union regions. It also highlights the potential benefits of diversifying the structure of production in Eurasia toward more sophisticated and technologically intensive goods. Second, the East Asia and the Pacific region (especially China) appears to be more protectionist than the European Union, suggesting a greater challenge for Eurasian countries in diversifying exports to the destination. And third, few or no regional trade agreements exist between Eurasian countries and countries in the European Union or East Asia and the Pacific. -
Publication
Toolkit for the Analysis of Current Account Imbalances
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-11)The fluctuating economies and differing experiences of countries before and after the economic crisis of 2008 indicate a complex network of possible influences. Persistent current account deficits and exchange rate misalignments frequently presage disruptive economic trends. The result can be external crises, exchange rate collapses, vulnerability to sudden stops, current account reversals, and economic slowdowns. When a growing number of countries run external deficits, investigation of the causes is warranted. It is crucial to understand the drivers of persistent current account deficits; the relative importance of cyclical and structural factors; conditions that imply external sustainability; sources of sustainable financing for the deficit; and steps governments can take to narrow the imbalance. This toolkit presents a framework that can be used to assess a country's external situation through the lens of the current and financial accounts. The framework is divided into three components: current account outcome analysis, current account diagnostics, and economic policy. -
Publication
The Demand for, and Impact of, Youth Internships: Evidence from a Randomized Experiment in Yemen
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-10)This paper evaluates a youth internship program in the Republic of Yemen that provided firms with a 50 percent subsidy to hire recent graduates of universities and vocational schools. The first round of the program took place in 2014 and required both firms and youth to apply for the program. The paper examines the demand for such a program, and finds that in the context of an economy facing substantial political and economic uncertainty, it appears there is an oversupply of graduates in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, and a relative undersupply of graduates in marketing and business. Conditional on the types of graduates firms were looking to hire as interns, applicants were then randomly chosen for the program. Receiving an internship resulted in an almost doubling of work experience in 2014, and a 73 percent increase in income during this period compared with the control group. A short-term follow-up survey conducted just as civil conflict was breaking out shows that internship recipients had better employment outcomes than the control group in the first five months after the program ended. -
Publication
The Additionality Impact of a Matching Grant Program for Small Firms: Experimental Evidence from Yemen
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2015-10)Matching grants are one of the most common types of private sector development programs used in developing countries. But government subsidies to private firms can be controversial. A key question is that of additionality: do these programs get firms to undertake innovative activities that they would not otherwise do, or merely subsidize activities that would take place anyway? Randomized controlled trials can provide the counterfactual needed to answer this question, but efforts to experiment with matching grant programs have often failed. This paper uses a randomized controlled trial of a matching grant program for firms in the Republic of Yemen to demonstrate the feasibility of conducting experiments with well-designed programs, and to measure the additionality impact. In the first year, the matching grant is found to have led to more product innovation, firms upgrading their accounting systems, marketing more, making more capital investments, and being more likely to report their sales grew. -
Publication
Spurring Innovation with Matching Grants: Evidence from Yemen
( 2015-11)Matching grants are one of the most common tools used in private sector development programs in developing countries and have been included in more than 60 World Bank projects totaling over US$1.2 billion, funding over 100,000 micro, small and medium enterprises. The Enterprise Revitalization and Employment Pilot (EREP) was designed as a two year pilot project aimed at improving firm capabilities and the employability of recent graduates. The matching grant component provided firms with a matching grant of up to $10,000 as a 50 percent subsidy towards the cost of innovation and business services like finance and accounting systems, website creation, training, marketing, participation in exhibitions, and some associated goods. The program implementation was designed with the lessons of other matching grant programs in mind in order to overcome their problems with take-up: eligibility criteria were kept broad; the application form was not complex and could be done either online or in paper; and the program was well-advertised. -
Publication
Corporate Governance and Public Corruption
( 2010-03-01)Corporate governance in the private sector and corruption are important for economic development and private sector development. This paper investigates how corporate governance in private-sector media companies can affect public corruption. The analytical framework, based on models of corporate governance, identifies two channels through which media ownership concentration affects corruption: an owner effect, which discourages corruption and a competition-for-control effect that enhances it. When the ownership structure of a newspaper has a majority shareholder, the first effect dominates and corruption decreases as ownership becomes more concentrated in the hands of majority shareholders. Without majority shareholders, the competition-for-control effect dominates and corruption increases with the concentration of ownership of the media company. Thus, the paper shows that cases of intermediate media-ownership concentration are the worst at promoting public accountability, while extreme situations, where the ownership is completely concentrated or widely held, can result in similar and lower levels of corruption. -
Publication
Competition, Imitation, and Technical Change : Quality vs. Variety
( 2009-07-01)Some researchers have documented that the path of development is remarkably related to the pattern of sectoral diversification. Others have highlighted the relation between productive specialization and economic progress. This paper explores the role of product market competition and intellectual property rights protection in the pattern of sectoral diversification. The paper confirms the insight of the innovation literature, that competition induces firms to specialize and upgrade the quality of existing goods. However, it reveals a new force, called the imitation effect, through which competition biases technical change toward product diversification. The paper shows that if knowledge spillovers increase with imitation, or the degree of product substitution is high, weak protection of property rights encourages firms to create low-quality goods, thereby directing technical change toward diversification. The predictions are tested with data on Italian firms' innovation activity. They are found to be consistent with observed behavior. -
Publication
Technology Adoption and Factor Proportions in Open Economies : Theory and Evidence from the Global Computer Industry
( 2009-09-01)Theories of international trade assume that all countries use similar and exogenous technologies in the production of any good. This paper relaxes this assumption. The marriage of literatures on biased technical change and trade yields a tractable theory, which predicts that differences in factor endowments and intellectual property rights bias technical change toward particular factor intensities, and thus unit factor input requirements can vary across economies. Using data on net exports of a single industry, computers, intellectual property rights and factor endowments for 73 countries during 1980-2000, the paper shows that once technological choices are considered, countries with different factor endowments can become net exporters of the same product. -
Publication
Helping Western Balkan SMEs Expand Exports Through Online Training and Consulting
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-12-01)One of the key challenges facing innovative small and medium enterprises is customer acquisition. This is especially a constraint in less populated countries like those in the Western Balkans, where domestic demand can be limited for specialized services and products. Exporting to larger and richer countries provides a potential solution, but expanding into foreign markets involves considerable search frictions, and small firms may lack the skills and confidence to market to foreign buyers. The authors test the effectiveness of a capacity building program that aimed to help firms bounce back from the COVID-19 pandemic and help them expand their markets and export more. The results show that capacity building can help provide the skills and confidence for innovative SMEs to better reach and sell to foreign buyers. They also provide some of the first evidence on offering training virtually to firms in multiple countries at once, which offers promise for the scalability of such efforts. -
Publication
A Firm-Level Productivity Diagnostic for Kenya’s Manufacturing and Services Sector
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2016-01)This technical note implements a firm-level productivity diagnostic using the census of manufacturing firms and a large services survey in Kenya. By using a number of stylized productivity indicators, we aim to identify the ability of Kenyan firms to grow. The information presented in this diagnostic will help to conduct evidence-based policy-making. Specifically, implementing firm-level productivity diagnostics provide the necessary information for (i) improving the targeting of economic policies, (ii) enhancing their effectiveness, (iii) making more accurate predictions of the effects of industry shocks and policy reforms on the economy, and (iv) understanding the behavior of macroeconomic variables by tracking the evolution of variables at the firm-level. This note shows that there is a lot of heterogeneity in firms’ attributes and performance, and this can potentially be attributed to the presence of economic distortions that affect the efficient allocation of resources across firms, with the manufacturing sector showing a lackluster performance compared to the services sector. Overall, the findings highlight the importance of locating productivity at the center of the competitiveness agenda as a key instrument for employment creation and poverty reduction.