Reproducibility package for What Does Venture Capital Actually Finance? Scale And Structure Around The World

The rapid expansion of venture capital into developing economies is widely interpreted as the diffusion of the U.S. financing model to new markets. We show that VC in developing economies differs from the high-income model not only in scale but in kind: in its role within the equity ecosystem, the sources of cross-country variation, and the type of intangibles it finances. Using a newly constructed cross-country dataset that harmonizes the two largest global sources of VC data at the firm level and aligns sector classifications with equity issuance records, we document three findings. First, despite its small size relative to GDP, VC is the dominant equity financing channel in developing economies, accounting for roughly two-thirds of total equity market activity. Second, an accounting decomposition of VC intensity into entry and lifetime funding per entrant reveals that the binding constraint differs by income level: variation among high-income countries is driven by entry; among developing countries, by how much funding firms receive once they enter. Third, the sectoral composition of VC in developing economies tilts toward organizational intangibles, such as distribution, logistics, and payments, rather than the knowledge intangibles that define high-income VC. This pattern holds at both the sector and firm level and has no counterpart in public equity, which finances a broadly similar sectoral profile across all income groups. Taken together, these results challenge the assumption of uniform VC development, and with it, the presumption that VC generates similar spillovers regardless of context.