Research

Much of the technology used by firms in developing countries is embodied in machines, and small firms often use second-hand equipment. This paper asks whether used machines hold firms back because they contain older technology, or whether firms choose them because they are cheaper and better suited to their capabilities. Using firm surveys from fifteen countries and panel data from Vietnamese small firms, I find that firms that buy only used machines are generally smaller and have weaker management. These differences account for most of their technology-adoption gap, while credit constraints play a smaller role. Firms whose equipment is entirely used also buy machinery about half as often as firms whose equipment is entirely new. I develop a model in which a new machine is more valuable to a firm with stronger skills and management. Firms with lower capability may therefore choose cheaper used machines and keep them until they break down. In an extension with a domestic used-machine market, capable firms sell their outdated machines to less capable firms. The model shows that banning used machines can harm both the firms that buy them and the firms that sell them.

What holds Canadian businesses back, who innovates and exports, how firms finance themselves, and how this differs by firm size, sector, region and gender. Using firm-level survey data, I map the main obstacles facing Canadian firms and run 35 applied analyses on innovation, productivity, finance, labour, trade, infrastructure, regulation and ownership.

The report has four parts: an overview of the survey, descriptive findings on obstacles, innovation, trade, finance, gender, regions and green practices, thirty-five further analyses (including exporter productivity premia, the R&D–innovation–productivity chain, credit constraints, gender gaps, tax-compliance burden by firm size and a business-environment index), and a data and methods section. All estimates use survey weights and design-based standard errors. The firm-level data are licensed by the World Bank and are not reproduced; the report shows aggregate results only.

How dependent are Canadian exporters on the United States, and which firms and provinces are most exposed? Using a quarter-century of Statistics Canada data on every goods-exporting business, I show that the share of exporters selling only to the U.S. fell for a decade and has risen again since 2020, and that small firms are the most dependent.

About 85% of exporting enterprises sold to the United States in 2025, and about 65% sold only there, up from a low of 56% in 2010. Small and medium-sized enterprises make up 97% of exporters but ship 41% of export value. Three in four exporters sell to a single country, while the top 100 exporters account for about 60% of goods exports. Every chart in the report includes the underlying data and a CSV download.

When an industry in a Canadian province produces one more dollar of output, how much of that dollar stays in the province, how much flows to other provinces, and how much leaves Canada as imports? Using Statistics Canada’s provincial input–output multipliers, I trace each cent through the supply chain, map the results, test whether neighbouring provinces look alike, and group the provinces into four types of economy.

Ontario and Quebec lose the least to other provinces, 5.7¢ and 7.3¢ of each dollar, but Ontario sends 19.6¢ abroad. Nunavut and the Northwest Territories send about 23¢ of each dollar to the rest of Canada, and this spillover is the only measure that clusters geographically (Moran’s I = 0.31). Alberta, Saskatchewan and Newfoundland and Labrador keep 76–78¢ at home but support only about six jobs per $1 million of output, against nearly ten in Prince Edward Island and Nova Scotia. New Brunswick sends 28.6¢ abroad, the most of any province, likely because of its oil refinery. The report includes an interactive map, trends from 2010 to 2022, rankings of the industries in every province, and the cleaned data as CSV files.

How did jobs in Vietnam’s small manufacturing firms change as the economy grew? Using five waves of a worker survey (6,878 interviews in 1,219 firms), I track wages and gender gaps, contracts and social insurance, how workers find jobs, who gets trained and whether training pays, and how job quality differs across provinces.

The median real monthly wage rose 43% between 2007 and 2015, while women earned 86–91% of the wages of comparable men throughout. The share of workers with a formal labour contract rose from 48% to 54%, and employer-paid unemployment insurance from 28% in 2011 to 41% in 2015, almost entirely among contract holders. Seven in ten workers found their job through family or friends, and fewer than one in ten through an agency or job advertisement. Trained workers earn about 11% more than untrained workers, but the premium falls to 6% when they are compared with co-workers in the same firm. The report includes a map of job quality across the ten survey provinces.

This thesis studies how the U.S. shale-gas revolution changed global petrochemical competitiveness and what it means for Iran's petrochemical industry. It combines a time-series analysis of WTI crude-oil and U.S. polyethylene prices, a panel analysis of polyethylene prices and the stock-market performance of major Iranian petrochemical companies, a company-level study of Shazand Petrochemical Company, and an institutional analysis of Iran's feedstock-pricing system. Competitiveness depends on much more than access to natural gas: feedstock costs, international product prices, exchange rates, technology, capacity utilization, and access to export markets all matter, and sanctions raise banking, insurance, and shipping costs and concentrate exports in a few markets, mainly China. The policy conclusion is that cheap feedstock alone cannot create a lasting advantage. Iran needs a transparent, predictable feedstock-pricing formula that balances a fair public return with regional competitiveness (for example, combining domestic opportunity cost with regional competitor prices, smoothed with a moving average and a price collar), together with effective export-credit support and more diverse export destinations.