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....

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...

This study investigates the political economy of industrialization in Ethiopia. It discusses the economic and political institutions during three political regimes and assesses the industrial sector's performance across these different regimes. Further, it evaluates the different industrial...

Like many developing countries, India features a variety of land-use restrictions that make it difficult to establish industrial firms on agricultural lands. Such policies have received some of the blame for the slow pace of industrialization, and there is widespread agreement on the need for...

To date there has been few systematic and comparative empirical analyses of the nature of economic development in Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa (BRICS). We contribute to addressing this gap by exploring the patterns of structural change between 1980 and 2010, focusing on the...

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...

We evaluate the impact of a place-based infrastructure development scheme directed towards India's most "backward" districts, on the performance of microenterprises. "Backward" districts were selected based on a transparent score-based assignment mechanism. Using a Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity...

This paper exploits time and geographic variation in the adoption of Special Economic Zones in India to assess the direct and spillover effects of the program. We combine geocoded firm-level data and geocoded SEZs using a concentric ring approach, thus creating a novel dataset of firms with...

We study the dispersion in rates of provincial economic- and TFP growth in China. Ourresults show that regional growth patterns can be understood as a function of severalinterrelated factors, which include investment in physical capital, human capital, andinfrastructure capital; the infusion of...

This paper documents the extent of inequality of educational opportunity in India spanning the period 1983-2004 using National Sample Survey (NSS) data. We build on recent developments in the literature that has operationalized concepts in the inequality of opportunity theory (including...