Policies promoting access to credit

Many factors influence the rate at which firms are created and the rate at which they expand. These factors include technological developments, institutional factors (such as the regulatory environment) and the functioning of credit markets. Much of the existing literature comes from the industrialized countries but there is a burgeoning interest in the role of increasing access to credit on the entry of new (especially small) firms and the post-entry growth of successful young businesses in developing countries. This is an area which lends itself well to experimentation and we hope to find suitable projects to evaluate.