Sectorial policies and structural transformation

This Opinion was originally published in Project Syndicate Data from a period in which both China and India pursued deliberate industrial policies show that neither country's development route is accessible to other countries. At best, their experience can alert policymakers to structural limitations and coordination problems that will require their own homegrown solutions.RABAT—What is the most reliable development path for an increasingly fragmented global economy? China ...

This policy paper explores how China’s economic development model—rooted in pragmatism, long-term planning, and civilizational renewal—has become its most compelling soft power asset, particularly in the eyes of the Global South. While critically engaging with Joseph Nye’s original conception of soft power as a primarily cultural and normative force, the paper argues that China’s ability to transform itself from an impoverished postimperial state into the world’s largest trading nat ...

Ethiopia continues to struggle to lay the economic foundations of food security for all, more than 30 years after first adopting the East Asian Developmental State Model (EADS) under Zenawi (1911-2012), continued under Hailemariam Desalegn (2012-April 2018), and later shifting toward a neo-liberal, Washington consensus-oriented approach under Abiy Ahmed (2018-present). The achievements recorded under the EADS approach—particularly double-digit annual growth, substantial poverty ...

The term “K-shaped recovery” was introduced to describe the economic recovery from the recession triggered by the Covid-19 pandemic. It refers to the uneven and divergent growth pattern between leading industries or sectors (the upper arm of the letter K—mainly the high-technology sector) and laggards, or the rest of the economy (the lower arm—the traditional industries). Since then the term has become popular in portraying divergent growth patterns within and between countries, esp ...

Thanks to the AI investment boom, the U.S. economy has performed well at the macroeconomic level. However, it is on an unsustainable fiscal and debt path. Mr. Trump’s fiscal policy in his second term has aggravated this trajectory. In turn, Mr. Trump’s tariff-based trade policy has failed to address what he sees as U.S. economic problems associated with the trade balance. Besides explaining why this has been the case, and what its implications are for the U.S. economy and the r ...

Available soon on livremoi. The 2026 edition of the Annual Report on the African Economy examines the issue of the valorization of Africa’s natural resources, particularly its mineral wealth. While the continent holds some of the world’s largest known reserves of a wide range of minerals and metals, the objective is not merely to catalogue these resources, but rather to explore the conditions under which natural resource endowments can be transformed into drivers of Africa’s in ...

This paper provides a structural assessment of India’s services-led development trajectory, and its integration into global value chains (GVCs) between 2012 and 2022. Applying an analytical framework that categorizes services into knowledge (KS), enabling (ES), and local (LS) sectors, the study utilizes sixteen OECD indicators to move beyond the narrative of India as a ‘services champion’ and reveal a more complex economic reality. The analysis identifies three central structur ...

This paper examines the evolution of China’s services sector between 2012 and 2022, analyzing the country’s structural transformation based on a novel three-tier taxonomy: knowledge services (KS), enabling services (ES), and local services (LS). Using sixteen quantitative indicators from OECD databases, the study evaluates China’s transition in comparison to the EU15 benchmark, highlighting three core challenges: manufacturing rebalancing, labor absorption, and global integration.Th ...

This Policy Paper has also been published in French and Spanish by Le Grand Continent Morocco offers a compelling example of how a middle-income economy can navigate a more fragmented global environment, characterized by weak growth and slower convergence. Since 2022, economic activity has remained relatively strong, with growth exceeding that of many comparable economies. Non-agricultural growth has averaged 4.4% since 2022, around 1.3 percentage points above its historical av ...

Africa is facing a massive electricity deficit that is impacting its economic and social development, and its ability to catch up with the rest of the world. It is imperative that the continent increase its electricity production to connect the 600 million people who are currently without access and to improve the quality of service for the millions who are suffering from frequent blackouts and load-shedding. Economic development in the 21st century will crucially depend on the digi ...

Au Maroc, la problématique des jeunes NEETs (Ni en emploi, ni en études, ni en formation) constitue une urgence nationale, alimentée par 300 000 abandons scolaires annuels. Face à ce défi, le modèle de l'École de la Deuxième chance nouvelle génération (E2C-NG) a démontré sa pertinence en affichant un taux d'insertion exceptionnel de 81 %.Cependant, ce succès institutionnel repose intégralement sur un tissu associatif local aujourd'hui fragilisé. L'analyse inédite des donné ...

In Morocco, the issue of young NEETs (Not in Employment, Education, or Training) is a national emergency, fueled by 300,000 students dropping out of school each year. In response to this challenge, the “New Generation Second Chance School” (E2C-NG) model has proven its effectiveness by achieving an exceptional employment rate of 81%.However, this institutional success rests entirely on a local network of organizations that is now under strain. A previously unpublished analysis of da ...

In 2017, eight scientists from the Google research team published in the journal Advances in Neural Info Processing Systems the remarkable article “Attention is all you need,” which introduced a Transformer neural network architecture. The paper has been cited over 173,000 times and ranks among the top 100 most cited papers of the 21st century. It builds on the attention principle introduced in 2014 by Bahdanau, Cho and Turing Award winner Bengio, who proposed neural machine transla ...

The energy shock caused by the war between the United States and Israel and Iran has highlighted the need for Africa to refine more of its own crude oil. Africa is a net hydrocarbon exporter, but remains stuck in the old colonial economic model: it mostly exports raw materials and imports refined products. Africa exports about 2.6 billion barrels of crude oil every year, and imports about 1.4 billion barrels of refined products. This is a problem for two reasons. First, Africa ...

Le monde du travail est engagé dans un processus de mutation sans précédent. La quatrième révolution industrielle, portée par l’intelligence artificielle (IA) et la robotisation, a été le point de commencement d’une ère nouvelle où les repères économiques et sociaux se redéfinissent à une vitesse inédite. Ces technologies suscitent un engouement légitime et offrent des perspectives prometteuses, mais requièrent une vigilance accrue face aux incertitudes qui les entourent.Bien que, à ...

This Paper was originally published on tandfonline.com This paper examines how reductions in transportation costs reshape regional economic and environmental outcomes in Morocco. We simulate a reduction in delivered (purchasers’) costs via a transport-margin efficiency improvement – implemented as a margin-saving technical change in the transport sector – within a province-level Spatial Computable General Equilibrium (SCGE) framework. Simulating a 1% decline in transport costs, ...

This paper, the fourth in a research series on services-led growth in the Global South, examines Egypt’s potential for growth and economic transformation through the integration of services into Global Value Chains (GVCs). It employs a new taxonomy that classifies services into Knowledge Services (KS), Enabling Services (ES), and Local Services (LS) and applies OECD 2025 Trade in Value-Added (TiVA), Trade in Employment (TiM), and input-output databases to benchmark Egypt against Mor ...

This paper is the third in a series of country and comparative studies that together comprise a research program on services as drivers of economic growth and structural transformation in the Global South. The paper analyzes the pattern of Tunisia's services-led economic growth from 2012- 2022 using a specialized three-category framework: knowledge services (KS), enabling services (ES), and local services (LS). Using data from the OECD Trade in Value Added (TiVA), Trade in Employmen ...

Decarbonization is reconfiguring global relative prices. As clean energy, natural capital, and location-specific assets become dominant industrial inputs, the relative cost of producing low-carbon goods is increasingly determined by geography. Two systematic distortions explain why the expected reallocation of investment toward renewable-rich economies remains incomplete. First, industrial policy interventions, including subsidies, trade barriers, and certification systems, disconne ...

Why only globally connected, knowledge-intensive services — not local services — can drive long-term development and productivity growth. This Commentary was originally published on stimson.org For decades, manufacturing was considered the indispensable engine of economic development, creating jobs, boosting productivity, and integrating countries into global markets. But automation, robotics, and intensifying global competition have made industrialization far harder for d ...

This paper is the second in a series examining services-led development and global value chain (GVC) integration in the Global South. It applies a three-category analytical framework covering knowledge services (ICT and professional business services), enabling services (transport, logistics, and finance), and local services (retail, hospitality, health, and personal services), to OECD Trade in Value Added indicators. The paper thus  ...