"This paper uses a randomized controlled experiment in Costa Rica to determine whether IB use by Banco Nacional de Desarrollo's micro and small enterprise (MSE) clients has an impact on their performance, measured in terms of productivity, increase in sales, and cost reduction. Results from the intervention group surveys indicate that Internet use is limited in MSEs' daily operations because of limited access to computers and the relatively low penetration of Internet services in employees' activities. In addition, firms have limited knowledge about the uses of the Internet as a business development tool. These results contrast with the reported benefits obtained by a small group of firms. Those benefits include reduced costs, higher sales, and better contact with customers."

"The Government of Nicaragua and the US foreign assistance agency, the Millennium Challenge Corporation, launched a rural business services program designed to boost the income of the small farm sector. Relying on a randomized rollout strategy, this paper reports the results of a multi-year impact evaluation that spanned the 5-year life of the program. We argue that impacts of a program of this sort are unlikely to be fully revealed by standard binary treatment estimators and show that temporal pattern of impact indeed evolves in important ways over time. Income in the activities targeted by the program steadily rose, plateauing at a 30% increase over baseline after two years in the program. The program also appears to have provoked signicant increases in both mobile and perhaps xed farm capital. However, on average there have been no signicant impacts on household living standards to date. Finally, conditional quantile regressions give evidence of quite substantial heterogeneity in program impact."

"A randomized control trial with 945 entrepreneurs in Jamaica shows positive short-term impacts of soft-skills training on business outcomes. The effects are
concentrated among men, and disappear twelve months after the training. We argue that the main channel is increased adoption of recommended business practices, exclusively observed in the short run. We see persistent effects on an incentivized behavioral measure of perseverance after setbacks, a focus of this training. We compare a course focused only on soft-skills to one that combines soft-skills training with traditional business training. The effects of the combined training are never statistically significant."

"This study, which is part of a larger financial performance series, provides the first comprehensive analysis of the financial performance of 55 private real assets impact investment funds in three sectors: timber, real estate, and infrastructure. The report also launches the Real Assets Impact Investing Benchmarks, which will continue to track the financial performance of impact investing funds across the three sectors; Cambridge Associates will update performance data on the benchmarks quarterly. Encouragingly, the findings show that risk-adjusted market rate returns are achievable in impact investing, as evidenced by return distributions of similar funds with no environmental or social objectives; however, fund selection remains important."

"This first of a kind report provides detailed cluster analysis of 398 impact enterprises across the three levers in five East African countries. The report is written and presented to be useful to all development sector stakeholders, with specific insights to inform decisions of investors, enterprises, and non-financial support providers across East Africa."

"The Global Cleantech Innovation Index (GCII) programme investigates where, relative to GDP, entrepreneurial clean technology companies are most likely to emerge from over the next 10 years - and why. Drawing on a wide range of factors and sources, the study seeks to answer the same question as the 2012 and 2014 GCII reports, namely: which countries currently have the greatest potential to produce entrepreneurial cleantech start-up companies that will commercialise clean technology innovations over the next 10 years?"

"Developing ecosystems can be a fuzzy business. Together with 300 partners, we made it a science. Startup Genome has nearly doubled the number of ecosystems studied since 2019 - assessing over 270 ecosystems across over 100 countries to rank the top 30 globally and runners-up."

"This paper is part of the Compendium of Evidence on the Effectiveness of Innovation Policy Intervention. This paper examines publicly supported policies for entrepreneurship development. Entrepreneurship policies are directed to encouraging socially and economically productive activities by individuals acting independently in business. Their principal objective is to increase a level of entrepreneurial activity which is considered to be below the social optimum. Policies may be implemented directly to address entrepreneurs' needs e.g. business advice programmes or through broadcast methods such as education policy. We have attempted to locate and focus on evaluations that reported on additionality / net effect or that use methods of causal inference to determine the effectiveness and impacts of policy. While policies and programmes for entrepreneurship can be simplistically modelled as a series of inputs beginning with cultural change followed by general and then more specific skill development, it is hard nevertheless to assess impact or trace causality because of the difficulty of defining discrete units of input, the presence of confounding factors and the length of time over which effects can build."

"The Impact Investing Landscape in Latin America is a joint report by the Aspen Network of Development Entrepreneurs (ANDE) and the The Association for Private Capital in Latin America (LAVCA). The 2018 edition of the report provides an updated, comprehensive look on the state of impact investing across Latin America. Using survey data from over 60 investors in the region, the report outlines trends in investment activity in 2016 and 2017, examines challenges for investors, and evaluates the future of impact investing in Latin America - where investors plan to deploy an additional US$2b in capital over the next two years."

"As the world continues to grapple with the lasting and uneven effects of the coronavirus crisis, this issue brief explores the impact investing community's ongoing commitment to building a resilient future. Specifically, this brief demonstrates how impact investors seek to implement strategies to strengthen both market and societal resilience to future crises. Based on interviews with 16 asset owners, asset managers, service providers, and social enterprises, this brief investigates the role of social equity in enabling that resilience and shares specific tactics impact investors have implemented or are considering implementing to address inequality."