Businesses play an important role in economic growth. Their ability to operate efficiently and to create well-paying jobs are crucial to building healthy, sustainable economies and to alleviating poverty. Yet, the lack of high-quality, in-depth data on businesses and workers has limited what is known about private-sector productivity throughout the developing world.
The Firms and Global Productivity initiative at the Stanford King Center on Global Development is a research and policy program that seeks to support and sustain rigorous, data-driven analyses of the factors underlying business productivity and to provide insights that can lead to growth-promoting policies and practices worldwide.
The Initiative also fosters idea-sharing and collaboration by bringing together academics with expertise in multiple disciplines, policymakers, and business leaders in an ongoing series of workshops, conferences, and special events at Stanford.
Two large-scale research projects that are the first of their kind reflect the Initiative’s mission: The Chinese Employer-Employee Survey and the Indian Firms Survey. Each analysis collects detailed data on thousands of local businesses and their workers and, as a result, is shedding new light on a broad range of productivity-related issues. These high-quality datasets will be accessible to policymakers and researchers worldwide, thereby enabling novel studies of both economies.
Insights gained from the surveys are enhancing the understanding of:
For more information about the Firms and Global Productivity initiative, please contact King Center Executive Director Jessica Leino at jleino@stanford.edu.