"This study presents a new approach to the estimation of the unmet demand for financing from MSMEs in developing countries. Importantly, it also describes the potential implications for the public-sector bodies, private sector financial institutions, and technology providers. The present research adds significant value to the repository of data in the MSME space, and opens new opportunities for further investigation. It estimates both supply of and demand for MSME finance on a global scale, which has never been done in a comprehensive way. This approach estimates MSME equilibrium lending in developed economies according to the industry, age, and size categories, and applies this benchmark to MSMEs in developing countries. It estimates the MSME finance gap as the difference between current supply and potential demand which can potentially be addressed by financial institutions."

"This report investigates the role of SGBs in economic growth and the key success factors of business networks for SGBs. It also spotlights the impact of two organizations - Enablis Senegal and CEED Moldova - on SGB growth. Finally, the report outlines implications for funders, ecosystem builders, SGB-support organizations and SGBs."

"This report highlights opportunities for inclusive business across five sectors: financial services, food and beverages, healthcare, infrastructure and skills building and education. It also shares insights gained from a survey, interviews and workshops on how inclusive business can be scaled to accelerate achievement of the SDGs by 2030.

This publication is the first in a series of three produced by BCtA to highlight the efforts of its members and other inclusive businesses in Kenya, the Philippines and Colombia, focusing on both the opportunities and challenges of inclusive business. It aims to encourage companies' engagement in inclusive business and contribution to the SDGs by offering examples of successful and emerging approaches, and indicating how governments and other stakeholders can support their establishment and scaling up."

"Anecdotal evidence of successfully accelerated ventures has been followed by more rigorous studies by GALI and some emerging academic research. But as the evidence behind accelerator effectiveness expands, the question remains-at what cost? This methods brief first frames the various ways accelerators can think about value for money of their programs. Then, it explores one practical approach to calculating value for money. Finally, the brief summarizes similar evaluations conducted for other types of entrepreneur support programs. Accelerators and funders can use this guide to understand their options for assessing value for money and to consider how they could incorporate this concept into their data collection and program assessments."

"Key research objectives of this report were to evaluate the quantifiable value created by impact-focused incubator/accelerator programs and to design and pilot a framework that can be used to objectively compare and benchmark impact incubator/accelerator programs against each other. This analysis builds on ANDE's previous findings and was conceived as a means to evaluate how and where incubators/accelerators are creating tangible value. One of the initial goals of the study was to help programs develop quantifiable evidence they need to make a stronger case for charging incubees and investors for their services and the value they create."

"This report outlines impact investors' approaches to achieving responsible exits, drawing insights from interviews with more than 30 investors and entrepreneurs and a review of existing resources on the topic. Four case studies of various exit methods as applied to investments in a natural gas conversion company, a microfinance institution, land conservation, and a microinsurance provider highlight the various effective practices and lessons that investors have discovered when working with investees and co-investors to align capital structures, buyers, and business models to ensure continued impact post-exit."

"Entrepreneurs are key actors in the transformation of low-income societies characterized by low productivity and often subsistence self-employment into dynamic economies characterized by innovation and a rising number of well-remunerated workers. To the extent that causal links from entrepreneurship to productivity growth are at work, there is room for using policy levers to quicken the development process by improving the incentives and supportive institutions that facilitate innovation by entrepreneurs. These analytical and policy issues motivate this report, which explores the challenges faced by potential high-growth, transformational entrepreneurs in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC)."

"What is the effect of exposing motivated youth to firm management in practice? To answer this question, we place young professionals for one month in established firms to shadow middle managers. Using random assignment into program participation, we find positive average effects on wage employment, but no average effect on the likelihood of self-employment. Within the treatment group, we match individuals and firms in batches using a deferred-acceptance algorithm. We show how this allows us to identify heterogeneous treatment effects by firm and intern. We find striking heterogeneity in self-employment effects, but almost no heterogeneity in wage employment. Estimates of marginal treatment effects (MTE) are then used to simulate counterfactual mechanism design. We find that some assignment mechanisms substantially outperform random matching in generating employment and income effects. These results demonstrate the importance of treatment heterogeneity for the design of field experiments and the role of matching algorithms in intervention design."

"The start-ups with the most potential to innovate and generate employment are the ones most likely to rely on capital provided by outside investors. Several institutional developments including the rise of business accelerators, angel groups, and startup competitions, have meant that founders seeking this type of capital increasingly pitch their business ideas to investors in group settings, raising the question of whether the order in which ideas are pitched affects outcomes. Research on order effects in other competitive environments indicates that judges often have high expectations and calibrate their evaluations to the lower average performance of competitors at the beginning of competition, making it difficult for those going early to do as well as those performing later. We test empirically whether this calibration effect is also present for efforts by founders to pitch investors by conducting a field experiment. Entrepreneurs participating in elevator pitch competitions were randomly assigned the position in which they pitched. We find evidence of this calibration effect: investor-judges expressed substantially lesser interest in pursuing investment in the first and second ventures pitched to them."

"The World Economic Forum is pleased to release Leveraging Entrepreneurial Ambition and Innovation: A Global Perspective on Entrepreneurship, Competitiveness and Development, which examines the relationship of entrepreneurship and competitiveness from a fresh perspective. The report builds on and advances our extensive previous work on this issue. The study described in this report combines two unique data sets, the World Economic Forum’s Global Competitiveness Index data, which ranks the economic competitiveness of 144 economies, and Global Entrepreneurship Monitor’s assessment of entrepreneurial activity across 70 economies."