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This article evaluates the effect of the overdraft facility (or line of credit) policy by comparing a large sample of overdraft facilitated firms and matched non-overdraft facilitated firms from Eastern Europe at the sector level. The sample firms are compared with respect to rates of different performance indicators including: technical efficiency (a Data Envelopment Analysis approach is applied to estimate the technical efficiency level for individual sectors), production workers trained, expenditures on research and development, and export activity. In order to avoid the selectivity problem, propensity score matching methodologies are adopted. The results suggest that a certain level of overdraft facility provided to firms would be needed to stimulate investment in research and development, which will eventually result in increased growth in productivity.

Access to Finance --- Bootstrapping --- Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) --- Debt Markets --- Economic Theory & Research --- Environmental Economics & Policies --- Finance and Financial Sector Development --- Labor Policies --- Overdraft Facility Policy --- Private Sector Development --- Propensity Score Matching --- Technical Efficiency

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This paper examines two sources of global knowledge spillovers: foreign direct investments and trade. Empirical evidence demonstrates that foreign direct investment and trade can contribute to overall domestic productivity growth only when the technology gap between domestic and foreign firms is not too large and when a sufficient absorptive capacity is available in domestic firms. The paper proposes the terms research and development and labor quality to capture the innovative and absorptive capacity of the country. The spillover effects in productivity are analyzed using a stochastic frontier approach. This productivity (in terms of total factor productivity) is decomposed using a generalized Malmquist output oriented index, in order to evaluate the specific effect in technical change, technical efficiency change, and scale efficiency change. Using country-level data for 16 Latin American countries for 1996-2006, the empirical analysis shows positive productivity spillovers from foreign direct investment and trade only when the country has absorptive capacity in terms of research and development. Foreign direct investment and trade spillovers are found to be positive and significant for scale efficiency change and total productivity factor change.

E-Business --- Economic Theory & Research --- Emerging Markets --- Foreign Direct Investment --- International Economics & Trade --- Labor Policies --- Malmquist index --- Public Sector Development --- Stochastic Frontier Analysis (SFA) --- Technical Efficiency