Business Environment and Firm Performance in DRC : Evidence from the 2024 Enterprise Survey

Overview & Synopsis

This paper provides the first analysis of the 2024 World Bank Enterprise Survey for the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), covering both the main and micro firm samples, with a focus on the most common business constraints faced by private firms, regulatory burden, taxation, corruption and access to finance. After documenting the structure of the private sector and benchmarking its performance against past outcomes and peer economies, we formally analyze the incidence of business constraints across firm types and estimate their effects on firm performance. We find that the private sector is still overwhelmingly dominated by micro and small firms in low-productivity activities, with limited structural transformation over the past decade. Constraints related to regulation, taxation, corruption, and access to finance remain pervasive and fall disproportionately on the engines of growth, namely high-performing firms, exporters, or smaller and younger enterprises. Econometric estimates show that these barriers exert a large and statistically significant drag on productivity, with simulations suggesting that bringing them closer to peer-country averages could raise output per worker by 10–40 percent depending on the policy lever. Our results highlight the urgency of business environment reforms in DRC and clarify policy priorities, both at the national and subnational level.