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Publications (26)
– The challenge for Africa
Why is there so little industry in Africa? Does it matter? What can be done about it? These were questions I put to Finn Tarp and Louis Kasekende, then the Director of UNU-WIDER and Chief Economist of the African Development Bank respectively, at a 2008 meeting of the African Economic Research...
– UNU-WIDER provides open access to a wealth of information
The question ‘why is there so little industrialization in Africa?’ has been a key focus of UNU-WIDER researchers and research partners for the last decade. Many Asian economies started their industrialization processes from conditions similar to those that African countries are experiencing today...
This week I attended the 28th Africa Industrialization Day at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Even sympathetic readers may reasonably ask, why hold another African Industrialization Day at all? The short answer is Africa needs structural change to grow, to create jobs, and to reduce...
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The construction sector plays a critical role in delivering quality infrastructure, which in turn influences the use of natural resource revenues towards achieving structural change and industrial development. We use industrial organization and political economy lenses to describe and understand the...
– A portrait of capacity and competition in various market segments
From the book:
Industries without Smokestacks
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– Local content in Zambia—a faltering experience?
This paper traces the role of local content in Zambia’s mining sector in supporting industrialization and economic diversification. It assesses productive linkages and manufacturing competitiveness during import-substitution industrialization and post-1991 liberalization and privatization, and the...
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– A portrait of capacity and competition in various market segments
Sub-Saharan Africa’s air transport, though low in overall volume when compared to other regions in the world, has experienced significant growth in the last decade, both in international and domestic traffic. The sector, in part because of its relatively small size, still faces the challenges of...
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Motivated by the fact that the taxation of natural resources is both crucial and particularly challenging for developing countries, this paper draws on a unique dataset to produce empirical evidence on two issues pertaining to the fiscal impact of oil. On a sample of 31 countries during the 2000s...
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– Telecommunication and ICT-based services trade
This paper provides a basic understanding of the nature of emerging key information and communication technologies, and establishes the distance of countries from high-quality access to the internet—the necessary threshold one needs to cross in order to make use of such technologies. The paper...
– The challenge of industrialization
International goals and Africa’s aspirations The international community has a new set of development goals, and they reflect Africa’s aspirations much more closely than the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) they replaced. Their single most important contribution is to recognize that sustainable...
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– Did China’s WTO accession affect African local economic development?
This paper investigates China’s influence on local economic development in 37 African countries between 1997 and 2007. We compare the average changes in economic growth, migration, spatial inequality, and welfare of mineral-rich districts, both prior and after China’s WTO Accession, to the...
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Special Economic Zones (SEZs) have been successfully used as an industrial policy tool in many countries. Efforts to create SEZs in Tanzania began in 2002, and were stepped up through the establishment of the Export Processing Zone Authority (EPZA) in 2006. A number of state-run zones are now in...
Mozambique, over the last two decades, has experienced explosive growth, with an average GDP growth rate of almost 8 percent between 1997-2015. Not only that, but, for the most part, Mozambique has a track record of solid macroeconomic policies, like controlling inflation, reducing current account...
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– Performance, prospects, and public policy
Tanzania ranks among the leading stars of the ‘African growth miracle’, but a sector that has been largely absent from the Tanzania success story is industry. Although growth of manufacturing has outpaced economic growth over the past decade, relative to international norms and its ambitious plans...
– Learning to Compete in Industry
Over the past forty years, industry and business interests have moved increasingly from the developed to the developing world, yet Africa’s share of global manufacturing has fallen from about 3 percent in 1970 to less than 2 percent in 2014. Industry is important to low-income countries. It is good...
Displaying 16 of 26 results