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Publications (39)
– 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...
– Views from Experts
13 September through 15 September 2018, UNU-WIDER hosted the Think development - Think WIDER conference in Helsinki, Finland. Over three days, participants from fifty-nine countries gathered at the Marina Congress Center to discuss the past, present, and future of development economics and the field...
The international community has a new set of development goals. They reflect Africa’s aspirations much more closely than the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) they replaced. In addition to a maintained focus on the eradication of poverty, their single most important contribution is to recognize...
Working Paper
pdf
– The case for Special Economic Zones in Africa
Firms tend to cluster in close geographic proximity to each other to benefit from reduced transport costs, shared inputs, and productivity spillovers due to learning and technology transfers. Evidence from low-income countries suggests that such agglomeration economies may be substantial in...
Journal Article
This peer-reviewed research is available free of charge. UNU-WIDER believes that research is a global public good and supports Open Access.
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 index based purely on the location of firms. We...
– Comparative Studies of Industrial Development in Africa and Emerging Asia
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. While it is possible for economies to grow based on abundant land or natural...
Blog
– Policy proposals
One of the strengths of the new UNU-WIDER and Brookings book Made in Africa is that, in the best sense of the word, its proposals are debatable. It provides evidence and arguments for particular policies. These arguments can be debated and form part of the conversation that allows policymakers can...
Blog
The 2016 Spring Meetings of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and World Bank occur during uncertain times for the “African Growth Miracle.” After more than two decades of sustained economic expansion, growth in sub-Saharan Africa slowed to 3.4 percent in 2015, the weakest performance since 2009...
Blog
– Who benefits?
Manufacturing production in both developed and developing economies tends to be highly geographically concentrated in cities and industrial clusters. Firms are drawn together for a variety of reasons, mostly motivated by the desire to reduce the costs of transporting goods, people, and ideas. In...
Research Brief
pdf
What types of businesses benefit or suffer due to geographic clustering? Data available from Cambodia on competition and spillovers—at both village- and commune-level—is useful to answer a number of questions about the effects of clustering and the possible benefits or drawbacks of encouraging the...
Research Brief
pdf
The clustering of industries in specific areas has improved industrial productivity in a number of countries. Since the mid-1990s in Tunisia, concerted policies have been introduced which focus on improving the efficiency of the labour force, and the productivity of firms by creating clusters of...
– Bad Luck or Bad Policy?
16 December 2014 John Page On 20 November 2014 the United Nations celebrated the 25th Africa Industrialization Day. But perhaps ‘celebrate’ is not exactly the right word. Africa’s experience with industrialization over the past quarter century has actually been disappointing. In 2010, sub-Saharan...
Working Paper
pdf
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, hindering the process of economic diversification, and...
Working Paper
pdf
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 primary industries but led to reduced domestic...
Working Paper
pdf
– Africa’s Presidential Investors’ Advisory Councils
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, Tanzania, and Uganda. It finds that the councils...
Working Paper
pdf
– The Case of Ethiopian Manufacturing
In this study, we investigate the relationship between exporting and firm performance using a longer panel dataset of Ethiopian manufacturing firms for the period 1996−2009. We test two hypotheses regarding exporting: selection into exporting versus learning by exporting. According to the selection...
Displaying 16 of 39 results