Person:
Hallward-Driemeier, Mary
Author Name Variants
Fields of Specialization
Private sector development,
Firm dynamics,
Firm Productivity,
Entrepreneurship,
Women's economic empowerment,
Investment climate,
Gender,
Development Economics
Degrees
ORCID
External Links
Departments
Equitable Growth, Finance, and Institutions
Externally Hosted Work
Contact Information
Last updated
January 31, 2023
Biography
Mary Hallward-Driemeier is Senior Economic Adviser in the Equitable Growth, Finance and Institutions Vice Presidency at the World Bank, overseeing its analytical agenda on private sector development. She joined the World Bank in 1997 as a Young Professional. She has published widely on firm productivity, the economics of technological change and the impact of crises. She leads the Jobs and Economic Transformation special theme for the International Development Association (IDA). She has served as advisor to two World Bank’s Chief Economists, co-manager of the Jobs Group, and Deputy Director for the World Development Report 2005: A Better Investment Climate for Everyone. Her previous books include Trouble in the Making? The Future of Manufacturing-Led Development (with Gaurav Nayyar) and Enterprising Women: Expanding Economic Opportunities in Africa. Mary received her AB from Harvard, her MSc in Development Economics from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar, and her PhD in Economics from MIT.
Publication Search Results
1 - 10 of 24
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Publication
Does Democratization Promote Competition?: Evidence from Indonesia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2020-01)Does democratization promote economic competition? This paper documents that the disruption of political connections associated with Suharto’s fall had a modest pro-competitive effect on Indonesian manufacturing industries. Firms with connections to Suharto lost substantial market share following his resignation. Industries in which Suharto family firms had larger market share during his tenure exhibited weak improvements in broader measures of competition in the post-Suharto era relative to industries in which Suharto firms had not been important players. -
Publication
Mind the Neighbors : The Impact of Productivity and Location on Firm Turnover
( 2009-10-01)This paper examines the impact of firm productivity and local industrial structure on firm entry and exit in Morocco between 1985 and 2001. There is strong evidence of productivity exerting a market-cleansing role. Less productive firms are found to be more likely to exit - and locations with more productive firms attract higher rates of new firm entry. The effect of productivity operates not only in an absolute sense; a firm s relative productivity or distance to the local sector frontier matters too. First, large productivity gaps are associated with higher rates of exit, while new firms are attracted to locations with small productivity gaps. Second, local competition increases the probability of exit, although it does not encourage entry. Third, there is evidence of scale or agglomeration effects that increase firm turnover. Fourth, measures of sector diversity are not associated with lower turnover. Fifth, the geographic level at which agglomeration and competition effects are defined matters differently for exit than entry. For exit, the provincial measures are strong, while those for communes are weaker. For entry, it is the local productivity at the commune level that is more significant. This implies that competitive pressures are less geographically constrained while the potential benefits of agglomeration and spill-overs are indeed more local. -
Publication
Who Survives? The Impact of Corruption, Competition and Property Rights across Firms
( 2009-10-01)Size, age, sector, and productivity are commonly cited as factors determining a firm s survival. However, there are several dimensions of the investment climate in which the firm operates that affect whether it continues in business or exits. This paper uses new panel data from 27 Eastern European and Central Asian countries to test the importance of five areas of the business climate on firm exit: the efficiency of government services, access to finance, the extent of corruption or cronyism, the strength of property rights, and the degree of competition. The paper finds that weaknesses in these areas do affect the probability of firm exit largely in ways that undermine the Schumpeterian cleansing role of exit in raising overall productivity. Greater costs and regulatory burdens raise the probability that more productive firms exit, while less developed financial and legal institutions mitigate forces that would otherwise push less productive firms to exit. Thus, the more productive firms stand to gain the most from improvements in the investment climate, whether that is lowering transaction costs or improving market mechanisms. This holds both within countries and across countries. The impact of a particular investment climate measure can also differ significantly by type of firm, with the focus given to firm size. The differential impact on size can be significant at a size cutoff of 10 or more employees. As these are the firms that are near the threshold of many regulatory requirements, the implications are not just with regard to whether a firm remains in operation, but whether it does so in the formal sector. -
Publication
Comparing Apples with....Apples : How to Make (More) Sense of Subjective Rankings of Constraints to Business
( 2009-09-01)The use of expert or qualitative surveys to rank countries business investment conditions is widespread. However, within the economic literature there are concerns about measurement error and endogeneity based on characteristics of the respondents, raising questions about how well the data reflect the underlying reality they are trying to measure. This paper examines these concerns using data from 79,000 firms in 105 countries. The findings show that first, qualitative rankings correlate well with quantitative measures of the business environment, using both quantitative measures from within the survey and from external sources. Second, there are systematic variations in perceptions based on firm characteristics - focusing in particular on size and growth performance. However, it is not that an optimistic view of the business environment is simply the expression of a firm s own performance. Rather, firm size and performance affect the relative importance of certain constraints, particularly in areas such as finance, time with officials/inspectors, corruption, and access to reliable electricity. The results also show that much of the variation in subjective responses by firm types is largely due to differences in the objective conditions across firm types. There is little evidence that size and performance have non-linear effects in how constraining a given objective condition is reported to be. Overall, concerns about endogeneity remain in using business environment indicators to explain firm performance, but this stems primarily from the fact that who you are and how well you are doing can affect the conditions you face rather than whether the indicator used is qualitative or quantitative. -
Publication
Big Constraints to Small Firms’ Growth? Business Environment and Employment Growth across Firms
( 2009-08-01)Using data on more than 56,000 enterprises in 90 countries, this paper finds that objective conditions in the business environment vary substantially across firms of different sizes and that there are important non-linearities in their impact on employment growth. The paper focuses on four areas: access to finance, business regulations, corruption, and infrastructure. The results, particularly on the impacts of finance and corruption on growth, depend on whether and how the analysis accounts for the possible endogeneity of the business environment. Controlling for endogeneity revises the finding that small firms benefit most from access to finance, particularly for sources of finance associated with investment and growth. The findings are also sensitive to how small is defined. Differentiating micro (less than 10 employees) from other small firms shows that, while small firms can be disadvantaged in such an environment, micro firms tend to be proportionally less affected by a weak business climate and, on occasion, it can help them to grow. Overall, allowing different size classifications provides insights into the impact of the business environment that are lost in more aggregate analyses. -
Publication
Does Expanding Health Insurance beyond Formal-Sector Workers Encourage Informality? Measuring the Impact of Mexico’s Seguro Popular
( 2011-08-01)Seguro Popular was introduced in 2002 to provide health insurance to the 50 million Mexicans without Social Security. This paper tests whether the program has had unintended consequences, distorting workers' incentives to operate in the informal sector. The analysis examines the impact of Seguro Popular on disaggregated labor market decisions, taking into account that program coverage depends not only on the individual's employment status, but also that of other household members. The identification strategy relies on the variation in Seguro Popular's rollout across municipalities and time, with the difference-in-difference estimation controlling for household fixed effects. The paper finds that Seguro Popular lowers formality by 0.4-0.7 percentage points, with adjustments largely occurring within a few years of the program's introduction. Rather than encouraging exit from the formal sector, Seguro Popular is associated with a 3.1 percentage point reduction (a 20 percent decline) in the inflow of workers into formality. Income effects are also apparent, with significantly decreased flows out of unemployment and lower labor force participation. The impact is larger for those with less education, in larger households, and with someone else in the household guaranteeing Social Security coverage. However, workers pay for part of these benefits with lower wages in the informal sector. -
Publication
Ladies First? Firm-level Evidence on the Labor Impacts of the East Asian Crisis
( 2011-09-01)In a crisis, do employers place the burden of adjustment disproportionately on female employees? Relying on household and labor force data, existing studies of the distributional impact of crises have not been able to address this question. This paper uses Indonesia's census of manufacturing firms to analyze employer responses and to identify mechanisms by which gender differences in impact may arise, notably differential treatment of men and women within firms as well as gender sorting across firms that varied in their exposure to the crisis. On average, women experienced higher job losses than their male colleagues within the same firm. However, the aggregate adverse effect of such differential treatment was more than offset by women being disproportionately employed in firms hit relatively less hard by the crisis. The 0 hypothesis that there were no gender differences in wage adjustment is not rejected. Analyzing how employer characteristics impact labor market adjustment patterns contributes to the understanding of who is vulnerable in volatile times. -
Publication
Investment Climate and International Integration
(World Bank, Washington, D.C., 2004-06)Drawing on recently completed firm-level surveys in Bangladesh, Brazil, China, Honduras, India, Nicaragua, Pakistan, and Peru, this paper investigates the relationship between investment climate and international integration. These standardized surveys of large, random samples of firms in common sectors reveal how firms experience bottlenecks and delays in hard infrastructure such as power and telecom as well as in soft infrastructure such as customs administration. The authors focus primarily on measures of the time or monetary cost of different bottlenecks (e.g., days to clear goods through customs, days to get a telephone line, sales lost to power outages). For many of these costs, the obstacles are lower in China than in the South Asian or Latin American countries. There is also systematic variation across cities within countries. The authors estimate a probit function for the probability that a randomly chosen firm is foreign-invested and a separate probit for the probability that a randomly chosen firm is an exporter. These measures of international integration are higher where investment climate is better. For locations to take advantage of opportunities in the international market, they need good infrastructure and a sound regulatory environment. The interaction of openness and sound investment climate creates a good environment for investment and production. This paper helps explain why China has been so successful over the past decade, both in terms of integration and of rapid growth, while other countries have had varied success. -
Publication
Deals and Delays : Firm-level Evidence on Corruption and Policy Implementation Times
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-06)This paper examines whether demands for bribes for particular government services are associated with expedited or delayed policy implementation. The "grease the wheels" hypothesis, which contends that bribes act as speed money, implies three testable predictions. First, on average, bribe requests should be negatively correlated with wait times. Second, this relationship should vary across firms, with those with the highest opportunity cost of waiting being more likely to pay and face shorter delays. Third, the role of grease should vary across countries, with benefits larger where regulatory burdens are greatest. The data are inconsistent with all three predictions. According to the preferred specifications, ceteris paribus, firms confronted with demands for bribes take approximately 1.5 times longer to get a construction permit, operating license, or electrical connection than firms that did not have to pay bribes and, respectively, 1.2 and 1.4 times longer to clear customs when exporting and importing. The results are robust to controlling for firm fixed effects and at odds with the notion that corruption enhances efficiency. -
Publication
Empowering Women : Legal Rights and Economic Opportunities in Africa
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2012-10-04)This book looks at the effect of legal and economic rights on women's economic opportunities. It focuses on entrepreneurship because women in Africa are active entrepreneurs, and the links between property rights and the ability to enter contracts in one's own name affect entrepreneurial activities. The laws that are the focus of this book are not business laws and regulations, which are generally gender blind and presuppose that individuals can own property or enter into contracts. Instead, the book examines family, inheritance, and land laws, which oft en restrict these rights in ways that hurt women. This book surveys constitutions and statutes in all 47 countries in Sub-Saharan Africa to document where gender gaps in these laws impinge on women's legal capacity, property rights, or both. The book also looks at some labor law issues, such as restrictions on the types of industries or hours of work in which women may engage and provisions for equal pay for work of equal value. These laws affect women as employees and influence the attractiveness of wage employment versus entrepreneurship. They were also selected because they affect the choice of enterprise women may run. The equal pay for work of equal value provisions are also of interest as an indicator of the recognition of women's broader economic rights. This book provides a series of indicators that show whether a country does or does not provide particular legal provisions. Several points are worth emphasizing in interpreting these indicators. First, the indicators are binary; there is no attempt to differentiate between small and large gender gaps. Second, the indicators are not used to generate an index or otherwise aggregate the indicators; no weights are given to differentiate the relative importance of different sets of laws. Third, the indicators reflect whether certain legal provisions are recognized in a country or not; because the link between the indicator and gender gaps is not always straightforward, care must be taken in making value judgments. Although some indicators reveal that women are treated equally or identify gender differences in treatment, others do not. Although recognition of these sources of law can have implications for women's rights, it does not necessarily imply that women's rights are stronger or weaker. Conversely, the inclusion of some protections for women's rights may reflect not the strong standing of women but rather the fact that gender equality is not seen as axiomatic and needs to be explicitly stated. Second and third chapters focus on formal rights and how they have been upheld in court decisions. Fourth chapter examines the gap between laws on the books and practice on the ground. Fifth chapter looks at how both the substance of law and women's access to justice issues can be improved to expand women's ability to pursue economic opportunities.