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...

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...

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...

Global supply chains (GSCs) are transforming the world. This paper explores why they emerged, why they are significant and future directions they are likely to take along with some implications for policy. After putting global supply chains into an historical perspective, the paper presents an...

This paper studies tax competition in an economic geography model that allows for agglomeration economies with trade costs and heterogeneous firms. We find that the Nash equilibrium involves the large country charging a higher tax than the small nation. Lower trade costs lead to an...

The design of institutions is shaped by a fundamental trade-off. On the one hand, relationships and heterogeneity push governance down. On the other, the scale and scope benefits of market integration push governance up. A corner solution is rarely optimal. An intermediate outcome, a world...

Revolutionary transformations of industry and trade occurred from 1985 to the late-1990s -- the regionalisation of supply chains. Before 1985, successful industrialisation meant building a domestic supply chain. Today, industrialisers join supply chains and grow rapidly because offshored...

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...

Global production sharing is determined by international cost differences and frictions related to the costs of unbundling stages spatially. The interaction between these forces depends on engineering details of the production process with two extremes being ‘snakes’ and ‘spiders’....

Unilateral tariff liberalisation by developing nations is pervasive but our understanding of it is shallow. This paper strives to partly redress this lacuna on the theory side by introducing three novel political economy mechanisms with particular emphasis is on the role of production...