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 special economic zones fall well below...

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...

Import substitution has been marginalised from development policy discourse since the 1970s. This paper examines the Rwandan government's recent attempt at reintroducing industrial policy with some attention devoted to 'recapturing the domestic market' - a term used to replace the ignominy...

We examine the ways in which political realities shape industrial policy through the lens of modern political economy. We consider two broad “governance constraints”: i) the political forces that shape how industrial policy is chosen and ii) the ways in which state capacity affects...

How can industrial policies lead to bank distress? In the 1890s, when undergoing rapid state-led industrialisation, the Russian Empire grew by foreign capital inflows into national debt and by state procurement of industrial output. Concurrently, state policies incentivised, but did not compel,...

Vietnam's industrial development since doi moi is a success, but only a partial one. This paper provides a political economy account of Vietnam's industrial growth since 1986. It shows that the key determinant of Vietnam's industrial growth lies in the relationship between the party-state and...