Industrialization is vital for inclusive and sustainable global development. The two engines of industrialization - innovation and trade - are in danger of being compromised by the COVID-19 pandemic, under conditions increasingly reminiscent of the medieval world. It comes at a time when...

The Fourth Industrial Revolution (4IR) is impacting on the industrialization options for Africa inter alia through three interrelated sets of technologies, namely automation, additive manufacturing and the Industrial Internet. In this paper I set out the case for why Africa should industrialize....

This paper shows that African economies have generally not de-industrialized, that manufacturing growth is very possible, and moreover that the contribution of manufacturing in Africa has been underestimated. As far as the future is concerned, African countries will in differing degrees...

In this paper we determine the industry 4.0 (I4.0) readiness of eight Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs): Bulgaria, the Czech Republic, Lithuania, Hungary, Poland, Romania, the Slovak Republic and Slovenia. We outline the nature of manufacturing in the region, describe three distinct...

Industrial policies, such as infrastructure investments and export tariffs, affect the allocation of labor and incomes across sectors, attracting substantial lobbying efforts by special interest groups. Yet, the link between structural change and lobbying remains underexplored. Using more than...

This paper explores the role of country asymmetries for trade and industrial policies with heterogeneous firms. Our analysis delivers a number of novel results. First, trade policies, infrastructure policies and industrial policies which improve the business conditions in one country have...

Governments around the world want to develop their ICT and digital industries. Policymakers thus need a clear sense of the size and characteristics of digital businesses, but this is hard to do with conventional datasets and industry codes. This paper uses innovative "big data" resources to...

This paper investigates the effect of awarding a second investment grant to the same firm. We implement a Regression Discontinuity Design strategy using a very rich firm-level administrative database, which allows us to link applications to grants and their scores to firms' performance. Overall,...

This paper develops a two-sector model that illuminates the role played by agricultural modernization in the transition from stagnation to growth. When agriculture relies on traditional technology, industrial development reduces the relative price of industrial products, but has a limited effect...

In the centuries leading up to the Industrial Revolution, Western Europe gradually pulled ahead of other world regions in terms of technological creativity, population growth, and income per capita. We argue that superior institutions for the creation and dissemination of productive knowledge...