Well-timed and targeted innovation boosts productivity, increases economic growth and helps solve societal problems. But how can governments encourage more people to innovate more of the time? And how can government itself be more innovative? The OECD Innovation Strategy provides a set of ...
Economic growth is one of the most cost-effective ways of dealing with poverty in Africa. Growth lifts many people out of poverty and at the same time generates the government revenues necessary for investments within the social sector. Thus the design and implementation of business development policies remains a major challenge in most African countries. This entails supporting businesses to be integrated within the global economic structure without being easy victims of unscrupulous and opportunistic investors. During the past two decades successive Ghanaian governments have implemented private sector development policies aimed at stimulating growth through internationalisation of local enterprises and attracting foreign investors. Contributors to the volume provide an overview of the impact of these policies on the Ghanaian business environment and the strategic orientations of managers. They also offer an insight into the productivity and performance of exporting firms, the financial and knowledge acquisition strategies they adopt, their degree of market orientation and corporate social responsibility and the challenges faced by African policy makers and managers learning to operate within an increasingly turbulent global economy. The book situates the Ghanaian experience within the broader context of African economic growth and calls for African economic integration as a platform on which African firms can build their competitiveness and operate more effectively within the global economy.
The COVID-19 pandemic struck the global economy after a decade that featured a broad-based slowdown in productivity growth. Global Productivity: Trends, Drivers, and Policies presents the first comprehensive analysis of the evolution and drivers of productivity growth, examines the effects of COVID-19 on productivity, and discusses a wide range of policies needed to rekindle productivity growth. The book also provides a far-reaching data set of multiple measures of productivity for up to 164 advanced economies and emerging market and developing economies, and it introduces a new sectoral database of productivity. The World Bank has created an extraordinary book on productivity, covering a large group of countries and using a wide variety of data sources. There is an emphasis on emerging and developing economies, whereas the prior literature has concentrated on developed economies. The book seeks to understand growth patterns and quantify the role of (among other things) the reallocation of factors, technological change, and the impact of natural disasters, including the COVID-19 pandemic. This book is must-reading for specialists in emerging economies but also provides deep insights for anyone interested in economic growth and productivity. Martin Neil Baily Senior Fellow, The Brookings Institution Former Chair, U.S. President’s Council of Economic Advisers This is an important book at a critical time. As the book notes, global productivity growth had already been slowing prior to the COVID-19 pandemic and collapses with the pandemic. If we want an effective recovery, we have to understand what was driving these long-run trends. The book presents a novel global approach to examining the levels, growth rates, and drivers of productivity growth. For anyone wanting to understand or influence productivity growth, this is an essential read. Nicholas Bloom William D. Eberle Professor of Economics, Stanford University The COVID-19 pandemic hit a global economy that was already struggling with an adverse pre-existing condition—slow productivity growth. This extraordinarily valuable and timely book brings considerable new evidence that shows the broad-based, long-standing nature of the slowdown. It is comprehensive, with an exceptional focus on emerging market and developing economies. Importantly, it shows how severe disasters (of which COVID-19 is just the latest) typically harm productivity. There are no silver bullets, but the book suggests sensible strategies to improve growth prospects. John Fernald Schroders Chaired Professor of European Competitiveness and Reform and Professor of Economics, INSEAD
Economic and social progress requires a diverse ecosystem of firms that play complementary roles. Making It Big: Why Developing Countries Need More Large Firms constitutes one of the most up-to-date assessments of how large firms are created in low- and middle-income countries and their role in development. It argues that large firms advance a range of development objectives in ways that other firms do not: large firms are more likely to innovate, export, and offer training and are more likely to adopt international standards of quality, among other contributions. Their particularities are closely associated with productivity advantages and translate into improved outcomes not only for their owners but also for their workers and for smaller enterprises in their value chains. The challenge for economic development, however, is that production does not reach economic scale in low- and middle-income countries. Why are large firms scarcer in developing countries? Drawing on a rare set of data from public and private sources, as well as proprietary data from the International Finance Corporation and case studies, this book shows that large firms are often born large—or with the attributes of largeness. In other words, what is distinct about them is often in place from day one of their operations. To fill the “missing top†? of the firm-size distribution with additional large firms, governments should support the creation of such firms by opening markets to greater competition. In low-income countries, this objective can be achieved through simple policy reorientation, such as breaking oligopolies, removing unnecessary restrictions to international trade and investment, and establishing strong rules to prevent the abuse of market power. Governments should also strive to ensure that private actors have the skills, technology, intelligence, infrastructure, and finance they need to create large ventures. Additionally, they should actively work to spread the benefits from production at scale across the largest possible number of market participants. This book seeks to bring frontier thinking and evidence on the role and origins of large firms to a wide range of readers, including academics, development practitioners and policy makers.
This new book contains contributions on countries from Italy and Mexico to China and India. It recognises the disparity between conditions in these countries and poses interesting questions about post cluster globalisation.
This is the first book to explain the expansion of multinational enterprises (MNEs) into a transition economy from a technology accumulation perspective. The author provides a theoretical alternative to accepted wisdom regarding technology transfer, and discusses the policy implications of this new approach for economic development.
During the last two decades, India has experienced a high growth rate, but the contribution from productivity growth and technological progress has been very low. This has resulted in a poor performance in the employment generation in the formal sector, and this book examines this phenomenon and the Indian growth pattern. Using primary and secondary data, the book looks at the impact of economic reform on technological change and total productivity growth, and in turn its impact on the labour market. It examines the effect of trade reform on the form and functioning of labour markets, and goes on to look at the impact of the global financial crisis on the Indian labour market. Offering interesting modelling exercises and empirical verifications that bring fresh ideas and new content, this book is of interest to academics in the fields of development economics, international economics and South Asian studies.
As firms increasingly rely on knowledge as a key factor for innovation, the ability to innovate is increasingly perceived as a key asset for being competitive in international markets. This new volume argues that innovation, knowledge and internationalisation should be viewed as tightly related concepts. It provides a stimulating and comprehensive framework for understanding key tendencies in modern economics, as well as an overview of the state of the art in the three fields covered. The first section explores in detail the relationship between knowledge and the innovative capability of firms, focussing on key topics such as social capital, intentional knowledge diffusion and unintentional knowledge spillovers. Section two examines the drivers and the impact of innovation strategies, assessing the role of technological advantage, networking and R & D investments in innovation, as well as the impact on innovation on the labour market. The third and final section examines the ongoing internationalisation process faced by ‘global’ economies. The topics explored in each section are tightly linked, ensuring that a strong thematic thread runs through the collection.
The COVID-19 pandemic has led to an unprecedented collapse in global economic activity and trade. The crisis has also highlighted the role played by global value chains (GVC), with countries facing shortages of components vital to everything from health systems to everyday household goods. Despite the vulnerabilities associated with increased interconnectedness, GVCs have also contributed to increasing productivity and long-term growth. We explore empirically the impact of GVC participation on productivity in Estonia using firm-level data from 2000 to 2016. We find that higher GVC participation at the industry level significantly boosts productivity at both the industry and the firm level. Frontier firms, large firms, and exporting firms also benefit more from GVC participation than non-frontier firms, small firms, and non-exporting firms. We also find that GVC participation of downstream industries has a negative correlation with productivity. Frontier firms and large firms benefit more from GVC participation of upstream industries, while non-frontier firms and small firms benefit more from GVC participation of downstream industries. Our results suggest that policies designed to promote participation in GVCs are important to raise aggregate productivity and potential growth in Estonia.