Working Paper
The Evolution of Industry in Uganda
The paper looks at the evolution of industry in Uganda examining drivers and constraints since the pre-colonial period in the 1940s to date. It is argued that the state played a central role in industrialization during the pre-colonial and immediate...
Working Paper
The industrial policy experience of the electronics industry in Malaysia
Despite the use of industrial policies to stimulate economic growth by several successful developers, latecomers have faced mixed experiences. Hence, this paper analyses the industrial policy experience of the electronics industry in Malaysia. A...
Working Paper
Scoping Paper on Kenyan Manufacturing
Three major policy regimes, namely import substitution, market liberalization and export promotion have greatly influenced Kenyan industrialization since independence in 1963. Overall, import substitution strategy was successful in establishing some...
Working Paper
The Evolution of Vietnamese Industry
The transfer from an import-substitution to an export-orientation strategy has been in effect in Vietnam since the reform process, Doi Moi, necessitating the reformulation of macroeconomic, trading and sectoral policies. As a result, the industry...
Working Paper
Scoping Study on the Evolution of Industry in Ghana
This paper chronicles the evolution of industry in Ghana over the post-independence era from an inward over-protected import substitution industrialization strategy of 1960-83 to an outward liberalized strategy during 1984-2000, and since 2001, to...
Working Paper
Mozambique’s Industrialization
After the Second World War, Mozambique went through a series of transformations, from an incipient industrializing colonial society to an independent country with a central planned economy, plus a regional and internal war, and finally from 1994...
Working Paper
China-Africa Co-operation in Structural Transformation
This paper examines China and Africa co-operation from the angle of structural transformation as a major driver of growth and job creation. Being a bit ahead in the structural transformation process, China can provide ideas, tacit knowledge...
Working Paper
Scoping of the Tunisian Economy
In this scooping paper on the Tunisian economy we review the historical background of the economy which has undergone substantial structural change since independence in 1956. In particular we emphasize that past record of consistent growth has often...
Working Paper
Innovation Capabilities for Sustainable Development in Africa
A sustainable pathway for Africa in the twenty-first century is laid out in the setting of the development of innovation capabilities and the capture of latecomer advantages. Africa has missed out on these possibilities in the twentieth century while...
Working Paper
Industrial Development and Growth in Nigeria
The structure of the Nigerian economy is typical of an underdeveloped country. The primary sector, in particular, the oil and gas sector, dominates the gross domestic product accounting for over 95 per cent of export earnings and about 85 per cent of...
Working Paper
Industrial policy, learning, and development
Industrial policies have played an important role in successful development. Through these policies, governments intervene in the market’s sectoral allocation of resources and choice of technologies. Earlier industrial policies had a narrow remit and...
Working Paper
State Capability and Prospects for Close Co-ordination
Recent research highlights the considerable potential of industrial policy to support structural transformation in sub-Saharan Africa. Given the importance of the state in industrial policy, this paper considers the implications for these discussions...
Working Paper
A Natural Experiment of Industrial Policy
Ethiopia represents an excellent case study of recent industrial policy experimentation in Africa. The country is well known for its successful promotion of the cut-flower industry through business-government co-ordination. What is less known is that...
Working Paper
Industrial Policy in Practice
Recent writing on industrial policy stresses the need for coordination between the public and private sectors. This paper examines the performance of one such coordination mechanism, Presidential Investors’ Advisory Councils, in Ethiopia, Senegal...
Working Paper
Regulatory Reform for Closing Africa’s Competitiveness Gap
Over the past decade, Africa has been experiencing an economic resurgence. Yet, the continent is facing several difficult challenges and many economies of the region continue to be among the least competitive in the world. Africa’s competitiveness is...
Working Paper
New industrial policy and the extractive industries
Industrial policy is back. Advocates for industrial policy argue that the important question is not whether such policies should be applied at all, but how to design and implement them. For the extractive industries this development poses a challenge...
Working Paper
Liberalized trade policy and inequality
The phased elimination of the Multi-Fibre Arrangement has been one of the most compelling trade policy reforms of the early twenty-first century, and has brought in significant changes in the industrial structures of the countries of the global south...
Working Paper
Scoping Paper on Industry in Senegal
Senegal is a typical sub-Saharan economy, which conducted an import substitution policy over 1960-86, followed by a policy of support for the private sector and liberalization of the economy. It suffers from a low level of economic development...
Working Paper
The Practice of Industrial Policy – Lessons for Africa
African countries are facing great opportunities but also formidable challenges in accelerating economic growth and sustaining a high level of economic performance. The experiences of East Asian countries may offer valuable insights for African...
Working Paper
Policy Co-ordination and Growth Traps in a Middle-income Country Setting
South Africa has exhibited tepid economic growth over the past twenty years as well as high levels of income inequality characteristic of a middle income country growth trap. This paper compares and contrasts South Africa’s growth trap relative to...
Working Paper
The Practice of Industrial Policy – Lessons for Africa
This paper draws on both successful and failing cases of industrialization in China to analyse the role of local governments in fostering the growth of light manufacturing. The broad spectrum of support types and the intimate knowledge of enterprise...
Working Paper
It Worked in China, so Why not in Africa?
African countries have sought to replicate the success of East Asia by implementing special economic zones. Despite decades of international experience, there remains no blueprint for successful special economic zone policies, and the majority of...
Blog
What role for East African hydrocarbons in the global economy post-Paris COP21?
by
Evelyn Dietsche
October 2017
Over the past decade significant hydrocarbon discoveries have been made across East Africa. Unsurprisingly, the respective governments countries have...
Working Paper
Industry in Tanzania
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...
Working Paper
From manufacturing-led export growth to a twenty-first-century inclusive growth strategy
Success in development over the past half-century was based on manufacturing-led export growth. Because the share of global employment in manufacturing will decline, manufacturing won’t play the same role in the coming decades. An increase in...
Journal Article
Measuring industry coagglomeration and identifying the driving forces
Understanding industry agglomeration and its driving forces is critical for the formulation of industrial policy in developing countries. Crucial to this process is the definition and measurement of agglomeration. We construct a new coagglomeration...
Book Chapter
Innovation Capabilities for Sustainable Development in Africa
From the book: Oxford Handbook of Africa and Economics, Vol. 2.
Working Paper
Six development paths in Southeast Asia
Six Southeast Asian countries (Cambodia, Lao People’s Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Myanmar, the Philippines, and Thailand) defied Gunnar Myrdal’s pessimistic prognosis in his 1968 volume, Asian Drama, regarding their prospects for development. In...
Working Paper
Structural transformation, inequality, and inclusive growth in South Africa
This paper evaluates structural change, inequality dynamics, and industrial policy in South Africa between 1960 and the present day. We find that South Africa experienced growth-enhancing structural transformation until the early 1970s, before...
Journal Article
Bringing state-owned entities back into the industrial policy debate
Discussions on the developing world's industrial policies have largely neglected the role of state-owned entities. This paper argues that the resurgence of state capitalism has been, in part, the response of developing countries to the recent pattern...
Working Paper
Differentials in market constraints and value addition among micro, small, and medium enterprises in Vietnam
This paper analyses the differentials of productive values in Vietnamese micro, small, and medium enterprises (MSMEs) and how market constraints have hindered their performance. Quantitative analyses suggest substantial differences in value addition...
Working Paper
Local content, supply chains, and shared infrastructure
Local content policies in the context of extractive industries have attracted increased interest in recent years. Most countries with a significant extractive industry have included local content requirements either in their legislation or...
Working Paper
The Southern African poultry value chain
This paper highlights the key strategies, both regional and domestic, that have led to the current structure of the poultry value chain in Southern Africa. While large firm strategies in poultry have been found to be regional in nature, and important...
Book
The Practice of Industrial Policy
This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. Much of the information relevant...
Working Paper
State-business relations as drivers of economic performance
Effective state-business relations (SBRs) have been lacking in industrial policy thinking despite the strong theoretical case for SBRs. The empirical study of state-business relations in developing countries has emerged only recently, with notable...
Working Paper
The governance of global value chains, the state, and small businesses
We use the case of the timber industry in Myanmar to analyse how national regulatory frameworks and international ecological discourses affect forest management and small businesses. The state plays two roles in the timber industry in Myanmar: it is...
Working Paper
South African gold mining and local procurement in Tanzania and Ghana
We examine the extent to which two of Africa’s leading gold mining economies, Ghana and Tanzania, have adopted transformative local procurement policies to enhance backward linkages from the minerals sector. We assess the impact that evolving...
Working Paper
De-industrialization, re-industrialization, and the resurgence of state capitalism
Discussions on the developing world’s industrial policies have largely neglected the role of state-owned entities. This paper argues that the resurgence of state capitalism has been, in part, the response of developing countries to the recent pattern...
Working Paper
Industrial development in Asia
Industrial transformation of Asia arguably constitutes the most surprising and dramatic change in the global economy in the last fifty years. This paper provides an outline of some of the most important trends of this development and analyses...
Blog
‘Industrial’ policy in the 21st century
by
John Page
October 2018
During the past week, I participated in two international conferences. The first was the WIDER Development Conference in Helsinki: Think development -...
Working Paper
Institutions and Asia’s development
The role of institutions in Asian development has been intensely contested since Myrdal’s Asian Drama, with later contributions from institutional economics and developmental state theory. Despite much progress, the dominant approaches do not agree...
Blog
Rethinking African industrialization on another Africa Industrialization Day
by
John Page
December 2018
This week I attended the 28th Africa Industrialization Day at the United Nations Headquarters in New York. Even sympathetic readers may reasonably ask...
Working Paper
Moving up the copper value chain in Southern Africa
Southern African countries—mainly Zambia and the Democratic Republic of the Congo—account for around a seventh of global production of copper. In the 2010s, they imported over a third of the associated capital goods and components from South Africa...
Book
Mining for Change
For a growing number of countries in Africa the discovery and exploitation of natural resources is a great opportunity, but one accompanied by considerable risks. Countries dependent on oil, gas, and mining have tended to have weaker long-run growth...
Policy Brief
Learning from a half-century of economic development in Asia
When Gunnar Myrdal published his magnum opus, Asian Drama: An Inquiry into the Poverty of Nations, in 1968, he was deeply pessimistic about the development prospects in Asia. The fifty years since witnessed a remarkable economic transformation in...
Working Paper
The state, the market, and development
The state has played a major role in the most important developmental successes. This paper discusses the advances in our understanding of the role of the state in the developmental process over the past thirty years, and the contribution to those...
Working Paper
Climate Change and Industrial Policy
This paper explores the implications of climate change for industrial policy (IP). Five implications are discussed, namely the need for international coordination of IPs; for putting human development, and not emission targets, as the overriding...
Working Paper
The role and effectiveness of Special Economic Zones in Tanzania
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)...
Book
Pathways to Industrialization in the Twenty-First Century
Over the last two centuries, the experiences of the first wave of industrialized countries in Europe and the US, and the more recent experiences of the East Asian Tigers, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, China, India, and Vietnam, have illustrated the...
Working Paper
Measuring Industry Agglomeration and Identifying the Driving Forces
Understanding industry agglomeration and its driving forces is critical for the formulation of industrial policy in developing countries. Crucial to this process is the definition and measurement of agglomeration. We propose a new measure and examine...
Working Paper
New Challenges for Industrial Policy
This paper calls for a fresh look at industrial policies in the light of recent trends and developments in the global economy. In particular, five new challenges and their implications for industrial policies are discussed. These have been neglected...
Working Paper
Identifying growth opportunities in the Southern African Development Community through regional value chains
This paper considers findings of studies analysing the development of a regional animal feed to poultry value chain in southern Africa (Botswana, South Africa, Zambia, Zimbabwe). The southern African regional poultry value chain is underdeveloped...