Person:
Grover Goswami, Arti

Finance, Competitiveness and Innovation Global Practice

Fields of Specialization

Firm innovation, Firm productivity, Innovation policy, Services trade competitiveness, Firm dynamics, Territorial development, Spatial economics

Departments

Finance, Competitiveness and Innovation Global Practice

Last updated: February 28, 2024

Biography

Arti Grover is a Senior Economist at the World Bank’s Finance, Competitiveness and Innovation Global Practice. She is the co-author of two of the World Bank’s Productivity Project flagship reports of the EFI Chief Economist – High-growth firms and Place, Productivity and Prosperity. Arti has extensive experience in working on complex analytical and lending projects in several developing countries, where she designed and implemented novel approaches to support firms. Her research covers a range of topics including firm dynamics, trade, productivity, entrepreneurship and spatial development. She is the author of two books on trade in services and has published over thirty articles in top peer-reviewed journals, as chapters in books, and as World Bank policy research papers. Arti has been affiliated, in a research capacity, with the Harvard Business School and the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining the Bank in 2009, she was a Doctoral Fulbright fellow at Princeton University and an Assistant Professor at Delhi School of Economics, India.

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 47

Which Firms Drive the Gains from Connectivity and Competition? : The Impact of India’s Golden Quadrilateral across the Firm Life Cycle
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-02-26) Grover Goswami, Arti; Maloney, William; O'Connell,Stephen A.
This paper uses the construction of India's Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) highway to explore the impact of an exogenous increase in market access and competition across the firm life cycle and generates four findings. First, while exit rates fall for all plants, aggregate gains are driven by expansion of young plants. Older plants stagnate or contract, consistent with the challenges of increased competition for incumbents. Second, the benefits of connectivity to young plants depend on access to complementary factors, such as finance, and business conditions, although older plants respond better in more distorted districts, perhaps reflecting access to inputs while protecting output markets as in de Loecker et al. (2016). Third, expanding young plants correspond to capital intensive value chain embedded activities that do not require close coordination with final producers. Fourth, plant-level panel data confirms plant capabilities as central to both the magnitude of the response, and to the composition of plants driving it. Aggregate expansion among young plants is driven by high skill plants while contraction of old plants is driven by low skill plants, consistent with frontier firms being able to escape competition (Aghion et al. 2014).
Does Informality Depress Investments and Job Recovery?: Firm-Level Evidence from the COVID-19 Crisis in South Asia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-10-09) Grover, Arti
Using three rounds of the World Bank's Business Pulse Surveys in South Asia, this paper quantifies the relationship between informality and firms' investment and employment decisions. Accounting for multidimensionality in definition and the margins of informality, the analysis suggests that first, informal firms remain credit and liquidity constrained before and during the crisis, especially the necessity firms. In the pre-crisis period, access to finance is correlated with the extensive margin of informality, while during the crisis, both margins of informality matter. Second, informal firms perceive uncertainty to be higher because of pessimistic expectations on recovery and lower ability to predict future sales, especially the necessity firms. Third, credit constraints and accentuated uncertainty among informal firms discourage investments. Finally, while employment growth is slow and gradual for formal firms as they begin to recover sales, job growth in informal firms does not correspond to the recovery. The results suggest that countries with a large informal sector may face unusually depressed investments and jobs recovery and may have to deploy additional policy levers to accelerate recovery in the post-crisis period.
Do Shocks Perpetuate Disparities within and across Informal Firms?: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic in South Asia
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-10-04) Grover, Arti
Using three rounds of data from the Business Pulse Survey in South Asia, this paper studies the differential effects of the COVID-19 shock on informal firms. It also captures heterogeneity within informal firms based on the degree and motivation of informality. The findings suggest that the severity of the impact of the COVID-19 shock and the recovery speed are strongly associated with the degree of informality. Firms' external attributes, such as size, sector, age, and gender of the owner, do not explain the depth of the impact. Internal characteristics such as poor management capabilities and education of the manager and owners are strong predictors of vulnerability among informal firms. In particular, necessity firms experience a larger drop in sales relative to the parasitic type of informal firms. To add to this, the adjustment response (for example, the use of digital platforms) of informal firms is smaller, which perpetuates the gap between formal and informal firms. Within informal firms, the parasitic type typically have a smaller adjustment response. These findings have implications for policies to support the private sector in the presence of informality, including considerations pertaining to targeting, modality of support, and the instruments required for designing more impactful programs during shocks.
Masters of Disasters: The Heterogeneous Effects of a Crisis on Micro-Sized Firms
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-08-30) Brucal, Arlan; Grover, Arti
Most crises have a disproportionately larger negative effect on micro-sized firms. Yet, the heterogeneity of impact within micro-sized firms is lesser known. Using five waves of the World Bank's Business Pulse Survey data, this paper finds that firms with zero to four employees have a much larger drop in sales and slower recovery rate compared to micro-sized firms with five to nine employees. The overall differences in the resilience between the two groups of micro-sized firms could potentially be due to a uniformly lower productivity level of firms with zero to four employees. Within the two groups of micro-sized firms, resilience is correlated with their liquidity position, managerial attitudes as well as their abilities. Using discriminant analysis, this paper confirms that a significant proportion of micro-sized firms mimic the behavior of larger firms in terms of their resilience to shocks and could potentially be “misclassified” as micro-sized. These findings have important implications for targeting and tailoring support for enhancing businesses' resilience to shocks.
The Effects of Energy Prices on Firm Competitiveness: Evidence from Chile
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2023-05-15) Amann, Juergen; Grover, Arti
This paper analyzes the impact of changes in energy prices on the competitiveness of manufacturing firms in Chile. Using the Chilean Annual National Industrial Survey data, the paper illustrates that, first, increases in energy prices generally do not hurt firm competitiveness. Second, the impact of energy prices depends on the fuel type—while electricity price increases are negatively correlated with firm outcomes, fossil fuel price increases have a positive association with investment and firm productivity, a result that is consistent with the strong version of the Porter hypothesis. Third, these effects are heterogeneous and vary by firm attributes such as size, ownership and location. Fourth, investigating non-linear patterns in firm outcomes based on the level of energy prices, the findings show that the positive correlation between fossil fuel price increases and capital upgrading is particularly pronounced when energy prices are at relatively low levels.
Trade, Transport, and Territorial Development
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-05) Dasgupta, Kunal; Grover, Arti
The spatial distribution of economic activity is known to depend on trade costs, both international and domestic. This paper examines the interplay between these external and internal trade costs using a model of trade and production that is tested with the organized manufacturing sector data for India from 1989 to 2009. The analysis establishes that the trade liberalization episode of the early 1990s helped spread manufacturing away from the primary region (districts closest to ports) to the secondary region between 1994 and 2000. Such dispersion of activity away from the primary to the secondary region was driven by high internal trade costs that insulated manufacturers from import competition. This trend reversed post-2000, a period of massive decline in internal trade costs, attributed to the Golden Quadrilateral highway upgrades. During this period, the districts along the highway network in the secondary region gained market access and manufacturing activity, while those off the network lost. Irrespective of the period, or the nature of trade costs, manufacturing activity in the interior region (districts farthest from ports) remained depressed, thereby emphasizing the importance of complementary conditions in driving territorial development.
Globally Engaged Firms in the COVID-19 Crisis
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-04) Constantinescu, Cristina; Fernandes, Ana Margarida; Grover, Arti; Poupakis, Stavros; Reyes, Santiago
This paper analyzes the initial impact and recovery of globally engaged firms from the COVID-19 crisis. It uses rich survey data of nearly 65,000 firm-year observations in 45 countries spanning three waves of data collection. The findings are organized in a series of stylized facts, which suggest that although the pandemic had an immediate adverse impact on most firms, the globally engaged ones are recovering faster, possibly due to their higher capabilities. Among globally engaged firms, those directly involved with international markets show better recovery than the ones that were indirectly involved. These results mask wide variation by firm traits, sectoral attributes, and country characteristics. At the core of the recovery of globally engaged firms is their heightened response to the crisis by finding novel ways to adapt supply chains even in the presence of lockdowns and uncertainty. These firms swiftly digitalized, introduced new products and changed their markets and sources of inputs. Over and above their capabilities, global engagement cushions firms against shocks. Policymakers could therefore facilitate global linkages by providing information on potential markets and products, by making production flexible in terms of facilitating remote work, reducing the rigidity of contracts; and incentivizing financial institutions to issue instruments that reduce uncertainty risk.
Proximity without Productivity: Agglomeration Effects with Plant-Level Output and Price Data
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2022-03) Grover, Arti; Maloney, William, F
Recent literature suggests that the positive impact of population density on wages, the canonical measure of agglomeration effects, is multiples higher in developing countries than in advanced economies. This poses an urban productivity puzzle because on-the-ground observations do not suggest that cities in developing countries function especially well or are conducive to enhanced productivity. This paper uses manufacturing censuses from four countries at differing levels of income that allow separating plant output quantity from prices. It shows that higher wage elasticities with respect to density are due to higher marginal costs, and agglomeration elasticities of efficiency, physical total factor productivity, are in fact far lower in developing countries. Further, congestion costs decrease with country income. Both are consistent with often low rates of structural transformation that make cities in developing countries so-called “sterile agglomerations,” which are populous but not efficient.
Place, Productivity, and Prosperity: Revisiting Spatially Targeted Policies for Regional Development
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-01-21) Grover, Arti; Lall, Somik V.; Maloney, William F.
Place matters for productivity and prosperity. Myriad factors support a successful place, including not only the hard infrastructure such as roads, but also the softer elements such as worker skills, entrepreneurial ability, and well-functioning institutions. History suggests that prosperous places tend to persist, while “left-behind” regions—or those hurt by climatic, technological, or commercial shocks—struggle to catch up. This division gives rise to demands to “do something” about the subsequent spatial inequality. Such pressures often result in costly spatially targeted policies with disappointing outcomes because of a lack of analysis of the underlying barriers to growth and structural transformation and a fair appraisal of the possibility of overcoming them. The latest volume of the World Bank Productivity Project series, Place, Productivity, and Prosperity: Revisiting Spatially Targeted Policies for Regional Development makes three broad contributions. First, it provides new analytical and empirical insights into the three drivers of economic geography—agglomeration economies, migration, and distance—and the way in which these drivers interact. Second, it argues that these forces are playing out differently in developing countries than they have in advanced economies: urbanization is not accompanied by structural transformation, leaving cities crowded and accruing all the negative aspects of urbanization without being concentrated productively. Long-term amelioration of poverty in lagging regions requires advancing the overall national agenda of structural change and productivity growth. Third, it provides a heuristic framework with which to inform policy makers’ assessments of place-based policy proposals, helping them identify the regions where policy is likely to have an impact and those that would remain nonviable. The framework enables governments to clarify the implications of various policy options; to think critically about design priorities, including necessary complementary policies; and to navigate the implementation challenges.
Firm Recovery during COVID-19: Six Stylized Facts
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-10) Cirera, Xavier; Cruz, Marcio; Grover, Arti; Iacovone, Leonardo; Medvedev, Denis
Building on prior work that documented the impact of COVID-19 on firms in developing countries using the first wave of Business Pulse Surveys, this paper presents a new set of stylized facts on firm recovery, covering 65,000 observations in 38 countries. This paper suggests that: One, since the outset of the pandemic, some aspects of business performance such as sales show signs of partial recovery. Two, other aspects remain challenging, including persistently high uncertainty and financial fragility. Three, recovery is heterogeneous across firms and more sensitive to firm-level attributes such as size, sector, and initial productivity than to country-level differences in the severity of the initial shock. In particular, larger and more productive firms are recovering faster, with implications for competition policy and allocative efficiency. Four, the decline in jobs has been steeper during the initial shock than the expansion in employment during recovery, raising the risk of a "jobless" recovery pattern. Five, the diffusion of digital technology and product innovation accelerated during the pandemic but did so unevenly, further widening gaps between small and large firms. Six, businesses now have more access to policy support, but poorer countries continue to lag behind and appropriate targeting of firms remains a challenge.