This paper examines Indonesia's upgrading within the global nickel value chain. Indonesia's transformation from a major nickel ore exporter into an integrated producer of refined nickel products offers important lessons for resource-rich developing countries seeking economic diversification....

This paper proposes an empirical framework that relates poverty reduction to production growth. We use the GGDC/UNU-WIDER Economic Transformation Database to measure the contribution to growth of productivity improvements within sectors and structural change-the reallocation of workers across...

Special Economic Zones (SEZs) have become common across Southern Africa in the past 20 years. In line with experiences in the rest of the world, they have had at best marginal success. Their essential premise is that it should be more efficient and effective to establish an enclave with...

Unlike in the past where industrial policy was either focused on creation and growth of state-owned firms or alternatively consisted merely of broadly functional policies without consideration for firm or entrepreneurial specifics, the requirement now is that future industrial policy ought to be...

This study shows that China's post-1949 state-led industrialization has closely followed an underlying path that began in the late nineteenth century. It was initiated by pressing national defence needs and has since been motivated by the same and strong incentives for a faster catch-up with the...

The main characteristics of 'the Swedish model' are arguably related to the country's knowledge-intensive industry and its advanced welfare state. The purpose of this paper is to discuss the historical development of these two features of the Swedish economy. The first part looks at industrial...

How does international trade affect structural transformation in developing countries? We use data on sectoral allocation of labour and value-added in 46 developing economies over the period 1995-2017 and exploit for identification plausibly exogenous variation in manufacturing imports from...

This paper explores the potential to leverage large-scale mineral extraction in Botswana, Zambia, and Zimbabwe to foster mineral beneficiation and upstream industries. The evidence suggests that the success or failure of a resource-based industrialization approach is country and sector specific,...

This paper explores the linkages between the national systems of innovation of Botswana, South Africa, Zambia, and Zimbabwe and their respective mineral extraction and mineral processing value chains, including input industries. Our analysis reveals four individual national systems of...

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 of structural transformation involving weak...