14 articles in this category
If you're a development planner or policymaker in a lower-income country, you face a tough choice: how fast should you push urbanization? Get it wrong...
Think about a typical structural transformation story: rural farmers migrate to cities, take factory jobs, join the formal economy. Governments expand...
Imagine a highway that feeds one city while starving the towns around it. That's the growth corridor paradox: a well-designed development zone lifts G...
You're a trade economist in Accra. Your briefing says Ghana must diversify exports away from cocoa and gold. The European Union is offering a preferen...
Central banks have a standard playbook: cut the policy rate, and demand picks up. But what if the economy is remaking itself—factories closing, worker...
Capital deepening is supposed to be boring. You invest more per worker, productivity ticks up, and growth follows — a mechanical function of savings a...
If you work in regional development or transport planning, you have seen the pitch before: build a road, bridge, or rail line to a lagging region, and...
You have a region—maybe a city, a province, a cluster of counties. You want to pick a specialization that creates good jobs, raises incomes, and doesn...
A finance ministry official once told me: We planned the transformation like a five-year plan. We funded it like a three-month budget. That gap — betw...
Structural transformation doesn't announce itself with a memo. One quarter your workforce is humming along; the next, entire job categories go quiet w...
In 2014, Ethiopia bet big on shoe factories. The government built industrial parks, offered cheap power, and courted Chinese leather firms. By 2019, e...
When a new metro line opens in a neglected neighborhood, rents rise before the first train runs. That is the paradox of spatial transformation: the ve...
So your growth engine is sputtering. The easy reforms — privatization, tariff cuts, deregulation — have been done. GDP still ticks up, but each reform...
In 2019, a midsize health insurer decided to overhaul its claims processing stack. The new platform promised 30% faster approvals. Within six months, ...