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This paper uses new survey data to measure the government's capacity to deliver goods and services in a manner that includes: high coverage of the population; equal access; and high quality of service delivery. The paper finds variation in these indicators across and within Indian states. Overall: (i) access to government provided goods and services is low-about 60 percent of the surveyed population are unable to apply for goods and services they self-report needing; (ii) inequality in access is high-women and poor adults are more likely to report an inability to apply for goods and services they need; and (iii) less than a third of the respondents who did manage to apply for a government delivered good or service found the application process to be easy. Access can be improved by reducing application costs and processing times, simplifying the application process, and providing alternative channels to receive applications.

Access To Services --- Inequality --- Poverty --- Public Goods --- Service Delivery --- State Capacity

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This paper details the results from the first comprehensive survey of private firms across major urban areas in the Syrian Arab Republic-including Aleppo, Homs, Hama, Latakia, and Damascus-since the conflict began in 2011. This builds on the World Bank's Enterprise Survey from 2009 and attempts to survey each of the 508 firms from 2009 again. The survey highlights the major challenges facing firms in Syria today, such as access to electricity, fuel, and water. Yet, loss of workers, managers, and supply chain relationships are also notably severe. Rebuilding the social and human capital of Syria may be even more difficult than the bricks and mortar. The paper also identifies the ways firms have been affected in their prices, sales, supply chains, taxation, and costs as well as how they have adapted in financing and employment. These constraints and impacts are also analyzed at the subnational level and across sectors. Firms in Aleppo stand out for their uniquely difficult challenges and responses that are sometimes at odds with the rest of the country. Finally, the paper analyzes firm exit from 2009 to 2017 and finds that higher productivity firms from 2009 were more likely to survive, except in Aleppo where the reverse holds. The paper hypothesizes that productive firms facing the particularly severe destruction in Aleppo may have made a different calculation compared with productive firms elsewhere: to use their capabilities to leave rather than to use their capabilities to weather the storm.

Access To Finance --- Access To Services --- Business Environment --- Conflict --- Conflict and Development --- Enterprise Survey --- Firm Death --- Migration --- Private Sector Development --- Survival --- Urban Development

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Simple linear distances between origin and destination poorly describe travel in Nepal, where rugged terrain, underdeveloped transportation infrastructure, and diverse vegetation heavily influence favorable travel routes. In this context, expected travel times explain more about the remoteness of starting locations than geographic distance. Applied to service facilities, these time-based measures of remoteness amount to measures of physical accessibility to services. However, traditional survey-based measures of time suffer from problems of inaccurate reporting and standard survey error. Instead, this study built a geographic information system-based cost time model of travel that enables more accurate and generalizable assessment of accessibility. Having validated the generic model and compared it with other popular metrics, the study demonstrates its value by inputting a variety of services into it. This paper provides descriptive analyses of accessibility trends to these services at national, provincial, municipal, and geographic scales and suggests research possibilities unlocked by such a general purpose model. The paper concludes with thoughts for how the data and analysis, both freely available public goods, can enable additional research and better policy making.

Access of Poor to Social Services --- Access to Services --- Accessibility --- Connectivity --- Geographic Information System --- GIS --- Inequality --- Poverty Reduction --- Public Policy --- Remoteness --- Roads and Highways --- Social Protections and Assistance --- Social Protections and Labor --- Spatial Disparity --- Transport --- Transportation Infrastructure

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The authors investigate the relationship between the productivity of African manufacturing firms and their access to services inputs. They use data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey for over 1,000 firms in 10 Sub-Saharan African countries to calculate the total factor productivity of firms. The Enterprise Surveys also contain unique measures of firms' access to communications, electricity, and financial services. The availability of these measures at the firm level, both as subjective and objective indicators, allows the authors to exploit the variation in services performance at the subnational regional level. Furthermore, by using the regional variation in services performance, they are also able to address concerns about the possible endogeneity of the services variables. The results show a significant and positive relationship between firm productivity and service performance in all three services sectors analyzed. The authors thus provide support for the argument that improvements in services industries contribute to enhancing the performance of downstream economic activities, and thus are an essential element of a strategy for promoting growth and reducing poverty.

Access To Services --- Communications --- Data --- E-Business --- Economic Activities --- Economic Theory and Research --- Electricity --- Electronic Delivery --- Enterprise Survey --- Enterprise Surveys --- Export Markets --- Finance and Financial Sector Development --- Financial Literacy --- Financial Services --- Information --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Manufacturing --- Microfinance --- Performance --- Prices --- Private Sector Development --- Production Process --- Productivity --- Result --- Results --- Telecommunication --- Telecommunications

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The authors investigate the relationship between the productivity of African manufacturing firms and their access to services inputs. They use data from the World Bank Enterprise Survey for over 1,000 firms in 10 Sub-Saharan African countries to calculate the total factor productivity of firms. The Enterprise Surveys also contain unique measures of firms' access to communications, electricity, and financial services. The availability of these measures at the firm level, both as subjective and objective indicators, allows the authors to exploit the variation in services performance at the subnational regional level. Furthermore, by using the regional variation in services performance, they are also able to address concerns about the possible endogeneity of the services variables. The results show a significant and positive relationship between firm productivity and service performance in all three services sectors analyzed. The authors thus provide support for the argument that improvements in services industries contribute to enhancing the performance of downstream economic activities, and thus are an essential element of a strategy for promoting growth and reducing poverty.

Access To Services --- Communications --- Data --- E-Business --- Economic Activities --- Economic Theory and Research --- Electricity --- Electronic Delivery --- Enterprise Survey --- Enterprise Surveys --- Export Markets --- Finance and Financial Sector Development --- Financial Literacy --- Financial Services --- Information --- Macroeconomics and Economic Growth --- Manufacturing --- Microfinance --- Performance --- Prices --- Private Sector Development --- Production Process --- Productivity --- Result --- Results --- Telecommunication --- Telecommunications