We consider the differential incentives of the North and the South to provide patent protection to innovating firms in the North. The two regions are assumed to have a different distribution of preferences over the range of exploitable technologies. Due to the scarcity of R&D resources, the two...

This is an attempt to derive broad, strategic lessons from the diverse experience with economic growth in last fifty years. The paper revolves around two key arguments. One is that neoclassical economic analysis is a lot more flexible than its practitioners in the policy domain have generally...

Many of the exports of developing countries are channeled through global value chains (GVCs), which also act as conduits for new technologies. However, new capabilities and productive employment remain limited so far to a tiny sliver of globally integrated firms. GVCs and new technologies...

I document a significant deindustrialization trend in recent decades, that goes considerably beyond the advanced, post-industrial economies. The hump-shaped relationship between industrialization (measured by employment or output shares) and incomes has shifted downwards and moved closer to the...

Africa's recent growth performance has raised expectations of a bright economic future for the continent after decades of decline. Yet there is a genuine question about whether Africa's growth can be sustained, and if so, at what level. The balance of the evidence suggests caution on the...

The contemporary approach to political economy is built around vested interests - elites, lobbies, and rent-seeking groups which get their way at the expense of the general public. The role of ideas in shaping those interests is typically ignored or downplayed. Yet each of the three components...

Unlike economies as a whole, manufacturing industries exhibit unconditional convergence in labor productivity. The paper documents this finding for 4-digit manufacturing sectors for a large group of developed and developing countries over the period since 1990. The coefficient of unconditional...

The question addressed in this paper is whether the gap in performance between the developed and developing worlds can continue, and in particular, whether developing nations can sustain the rapid growth they have experienced of late. The good news is that growth in the developing world should...

The focus of policy reform in developing countries has moved from getting prices right to getting institutions right, and accordingly countries are increasingly being advised to move towards "best-practice" institutions. This paper argues that appropriate institutions for developing countries...

South Africa has undergone a remarkable transformation since its democratic transition in 1994, but economic growth and employment generation have been disappointing. Most worryingly, unemployment is currently among the highest in the world. While the proximate cause of high unemployment is that...