Firm Size, Market Liberalization and Growth

Petar Stankov (CERGE-EI, Prague; UNWE, Sofia)

Abstract: Economies have markedly different firm size distributions. At the same time, firms of different size grow differently after identical financial and product-market liberalization reforms. Thus, identical reforms can produce different growth outcomes across countries. This result is reached after exploring firm-level data on sales and sales per worker across 135 developing and post-transition economies. It helps explain the remarkable variation in the vast development literature studying the effects of various market-oriented reforms across countries and over time.


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