Cruz, Marcio

Person:
Cruz, Marcio

Economic Policy and Market Research Department of the International Finance Corporation

Fields of Specialization

Firms, Entrepreneurship, Technology Adoption

ORCID

0000-0001-6306-8545

External Links

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Last updated: June 11, 2025

Biography

Marcio Cruz is a principal economist with the Economic Policy Research unit of the International Finance Corporation. Previously, he was a senior economist with the Finance, Competitiveness, and Innovation Global Practice of the World Bank. His research has focused on firm dynamics, technology adoption, entrepreneurship, international trade, and impact evaluation. He also worked in the Development Economics Vice Presidency, contributing to the World Bank’s flagship publications Global Economic Prospects and Global Monitoring Report. Before joining the World Bank, Cruz was a tenured professor in the Department of Economics at the Federal University of Parana in Brazil and an economist for the Secretary of Planning of the state of Parana. His research has been published in scholarly journals such as the Journal of International Economics, Small Business Economics, and World Development. He holds a PhD in international economics from the Graduate Institute in Geneva.

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Publication Search Results

Now showing 1 - 10 of 40

Digital Opportunities in African Businesses
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-05-16) Cruz, Marcio; Cruz, Marcio
Adoption of digital technologies is widely acknowledged to boost productivity and employment, stimulate investment, and promote growth and development. Africa has already benefited from a rapid diffusion of information and communications technology, characterized by the widespread adoption of mobile phones. However, access to and use of digital technology among firms is uneven in the region, varying not just among countries but also within them. Consequently, African businesses may not be reaping the full potential benefits offered by ongoing improvements in digital infrastructure. Using rich datasets, “Digital Opportunities in African Businesses” offers a new understanding of the region’s incomplete digitalization—namely, shortfalls in the adoption and effective use of digital technology by firms to perform productive tasks. The research presented here also highlights the challenges in addressing incomplete digitalization, finding that the cost of machinery, equipment, and software, as well as the cost of connectivity to the internet, is significantly more expensive in Africa than elsewhere. “Digital Opportunities in African Businesses” outlines ways in which the private sector, with support from policy makers, international institutions, and regulators, can help bring down these costs, stimulating more widespread digitalization of the region’s firms, thereby boosting productivity and, by extension, economic development. This book will be relevant to anyone with an interest in furthering digitalization across Africa.
Estimating the Number of Firms in Africa
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-13) Cruz, Marcio; Moelders, Florian; Salgado, Edgar; Volk, Ariane
This paper estimates the number of firms in Africa, considering their size and formal status. It relies on a novel methodology that combines multiple data sources. The results suggest that in 2020, there were 12.7 million firms with more than one worker, and more than 230 million own-account businesses, where the proprietor constituted the sole employee. Informality is prevalent among own-account, micro, and small businesses. The density of medium and large firms relative to the population remains low across African countries but is positively correlated with per capita income, whereas the prevalence of own-account businesses decreases as income levels rise. The proposed methodology provides valuable insights to researchers and policymakers by enabling an assessment of the potential market size based on firm characteristics in a context of limited information.
Technology Sophistication across Establishments
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-01-28) Comin, Diego A.; Cirera, Xavier; Cruz, Marcio
This paper examines technology sophistication in establishments. To comprehensively measure technology sophistication, a grid is created that covers key business functions and the technologies used to conduct them. Analyzing data from over 21,000 establishments in 15 countries, the authors find that the most widely used technology is usually not the most sophisticated available in the business function. There is significant variation in technology sophistication across and within countries, explaining 31% of productivity dispersion and over half of the agricultural productivity gap. The sophistication of widely used technologies is more relevant for productivity than the most advanced technologies. More sophisticated technologies are appropriate for both developed and developing countries.
Developing Entrepreneurial Ecosystems for Digital Businesses and Beyond: A Diagnostic Toolkit
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2023-10-18) Zhu, Tingting Juni; Cruz, Marcio
An entrepreneurial ecosystem is characterized by the structure and interactions of organizations, firms, institutions, and individuals in a specific locale that is conducive to entrepreneurship. It can be defined as a set of interdependent actors and factors that are governed in such a way that they enable productive entrepreneurship in a particular territory. The World Bank has developed a new toolkit, Developing Entrepreneurial Ecosystems for Digital Businesses and Beyond, for entrepreneurial ecosystem assessments, including dedicated methodologies and data sets, to nurture digital entrepreneurship. This toolkit builds on the World Bank’s expertise in collecting and analyzing firm-level data, assessing the quality and efficiency of policies that support innovation and small and medium enterprises, and deriving insights from spatial economics to inform subnational analysis. The toolkit consists of six modules: cross-country context analysis, assessing local entrepreneurial ecosystems, digital entrepreneurship and tech start-ups, mapping public programs and intermediary organizations, digital market regulations, and policy options to support entrepreneurial ecosystems.
The Quality and Price of Africa’s Imports of Digital Goods
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-03-08) Bastos, Paulo; Castro, Lucio; Cruz, Marcio
Imported digital goods are critical for productivity growth in low-income countries. Using detailed data on international trade flows and tariffs, this paper finds that African nations tend to import relatively low quality, low price digital goods. It also finds that digital goods in Africa are subject to relatively higher tariffs, along with other factors that contribute to their higher cost in the domestic market compared to other regions, especially in some low-income countries. The findings show that the African Continental Free Trade Area will do little to reduce this tariff burden, as most digital goods are sourced from higher income nonmembers. In contrast, unilateral tariff liberalization toward all countries would significantly increase the imports of digital goods in Africa.
Firm-Level Technology Adoption in Vietnam
(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2021-03) Comin, Diego; Cirera, Xavier; Lee, Kyung Min; Cruz, Marcio; Soares Martins-Neto, Antonio
This paper describes the results of a new firm survey to measure technology use and adoption implemented prior to the COVID-19 pandemic in Vietnam. It analyzes the use and adoption of technology among Vietnamese firms and identifies some of the key barriers to adoption and diffusion. The analysis offers new and important stylized facts on firm-level use of technologies. First, although access to the internet is almost universal in Vietnam, firms had low digital readiness to face the COVID-19 pandemic; and the share of establishments with their own website, social media, and cloud computing is still small. Second, the use of Industry 4.0 technologies is incipient. Third, the technology gap with the use of frontier technologies in some general business functions, such as quality control, production planning, sales, and sourcing and procurement, is large. Fourth, the manufacturing sector faces the largest technological gap, larger than services and agricultural firms. The analysis of the main barriers and drivers to technology adoption and use shows the importance of good management quality for technology adoption, and that there is a technology premium associated with exporting activities. Finally, the analysis also shows that firms are largely unaware of the available public policy support for technology upgrading.
The Role of Technology in Reducing the Gender Gap in Productivity
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-05-16) Cirera, Xavier; Cruz, Marcio; Martins-Neto, Antonio; Lee, Kyungmin; Nogueira, Caroline
This paper explores new firm-level data to examine the gender gap in technology adoption and the associated effect on firm performance. The data show a small difference in technology sophistication between firms managed by women and those managed by men, but there are larger differences in terms of labor productivity. Firms with female top managers are just as likely to adopt the most sophisticated technologies for general business functions that are common across all firms except for enterprise resource planning. However, firms managed by women adopt advanced technologies less frequently for sector-specific business functions. The study also finds that firms with higher technology sophistication tend to have higher productivity and the returns to the use of more sophisticated technologies are larger in businesses managed by women, which helps to narrow the productivity gap between firms managed by women and those managed by men.
Disruptive Technologies and Finance: An Analysis of Digital Startups in Africa
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-04-18) Cruz, Marcio; Pereira-Lopez, Mariana; Salgado, Edgar
This paper investigates the relationship between disruptive technologies and access to finance for digital tech firms in Africa. Through textual analysis of data from Crunchbase and Pitchbook, the study explores how firms across different age cohorts incorporate disruptive technologies into their offerings in e-commerce, fintech, and information technology services. The findings reveal three key insights for African digital tech startups. First, African startups are less likely to incorporate disruptive technologies into their offerings compared to other regions, except for mobile payments. Second, incorporating these technologies is associated with more funding, but this link is weaker in Africa than in other regions. These results hold when excluding mobile payments and addressing potential endogeneity using instrumental variables. Third, firms that do incorporate disruptive technologies tend to secure funding earlier, with lower initial amounts, but are more likely to succeed in terms of exit or valuation growth than their peers.
Bridging the Technological Divide: Technology Adoption by Firms in Developing Countries
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-06-15) Comin, Diego; Cirera, Xavier; Cruz, Marcio
Many of the main problems facing developing countries today and tomorrow--growth, poverty reduction, inequality, food insecurity, job creation, recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic, and adjustment to climate change--hinge on adopting better technology, a key driver of economic development. Access to technology is not enough: firms have to adopt it. Yet it is precisely the uptake of technology that is lagging in many firms in developing countries. The COVID-19 pandemic drove a big uptake of technology, especially digital technologies. Bridging the Technological Divide: Technology Adoption by Firms in Developing Countries takes advantage of this shift to delve into which firms have adopted and use technologies and to what purpose. To do so, it proposes a new approach to measure and understand the adoption and use of technologies by firms. Specifically, it leverages a new data collection instrument, the Firm-level Adoption of Technology (FAT) survey, which provides a very rich characterization of the technologies used and the processes of adoption by firms in developing countries. This book helps open the “black box” of technology adoption by firms. The seventh volume in the World Bank’s Productivity Project series, it will further both research and policy that can be used to support technology adoption by firms in developing countries.
Digital Senegal for Inclusive Growth: Technological Transformation for Better and More Jobs
(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-02-03) Cruz, Marcio; Dutz, Mark A.; Rodríguez-Castelán, Carlos
Digital Senegal for Inclusive Growth explores possible solutions for a more intensive use of digital technologies, especially by small and medium enterprises, to increase their productivity and create more quality jobs. The report will contribute to helping women and young people in particular to gain access to decent work and therefore reduce their exposure to poverty. Appropriate use of this report will make it possible to succeed in the challenges of digital transformation, especially in the context of a relatively young population that is more open to innovation and change.