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"Farole, Thomas"
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Putting the green back in greenbacks: opportunities for a truly green stimulus
Can countries reorient their productive capacity to become more environmentally friendly and inclusive? To investigate this question this paper uses a standard Input-Output modeling framework and data from 141 countries and regions to construct a new global dataset of employment, value-added, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (disaggregated into CO 2 and Non-CO 2 elements), and air pollution (including nine categories of air pollutants such as PM 2.5 ) multipliers from supply side investments. We find that many of the traditional sectors in agriculture and industry have large employment multipliers, but also generate male dominant, lower skill employment, and tend to have higher emission multipliers. It is in economies dominated by these sectors that trade-offs to a ‘greener’ transition will emerge most sharply. However, we find a substantial heterogeneity in outcomes, so even in these economies, there exist other sectors with high employment multipliers and low emissions, including sectors that are more conducive to female employment. In addition, we find a high correlation between industries that generate GHG emissions, which cause long term climate impacts, and those that generate air pollution, which have immediate harmful impacts on human health, suggesting that policies could be designed to simultaneously confer longer climate benefits with immediate health improvements. Our results confirm some of the findings from recent research and shed new light on opportunities for greening economies.
Journal Article
Special economic zones : progress, emerging challenges, and future directions
For countries as diverse as China and Mauritius, Special Economic Zones (SEZs) have been a powerful tool to attract foreign investment, promote export-oriented growth, and generate employment; for many others, the results have been less than encouraging. While the benefits and limitations of zones will no doubt continue to be debated, what is clear is that policymakers are increasingly attracted to them as an instrument of trade, investment, industrial, and spatial policy. Since the mid 1980s, the number of newly-established zones has grown rapidly in almost all regions, with dramatic growth in developing countries. In parallel with this growth and in the evolving context of global trade and investment, zones are also undergoing significant change in both their form and function, with traditional export processing zones (EPZs) increasingly giving way to larger and more flexible SEZ models. This new context will bring significant opportunities for developing countries to take advantage of SEZs, but will also raise new challenges to their successful design and implementation. This volume aims to contribute to a better understanding of the role and practice of SEZs in developing countries, in order to better equip policymakers in making effective decisions in planning and implementing SEZ programs. It covers some of the emerging issues and challenges in SEZs including upgrading, regional integration, WTO compliance, innovation, the environment, and gender issues with practical case examples from SEZ programs in developing countries.
eBook
Making foreign direct investment work for Sub-Saharan Africa
Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) is becoming an increasingly significant catalyst for output and trade in developing countries, in part due to a major expansion in the scope of Global Value Chains (GVCs). FDI delivers a number of important contributions to economic development in terms of investment, employment, and foreign exchange. However, it is FDI's spillover potential-the productivity gain resulting from the diffusion of knowledge and technology from foreign investors to local firms and workers-that is perhaps its most valuable input to long-run growth and development. While substantial empirical evidence has been amassed over the past decade on the existence and dynamics of FDI spillovers, the results are mixed-simply attracting FDI by no means guarantees that a country will benefit from spillovers. This chapter provides an overview of the objectives of the research for which the results are presented in this book. The aim of the research is to identify the critical factors for the realization of FDI-related spillovers including dynamic interactions between FDI and local suppliers, service providers, workers, local producers, customers, and institutions. The research involved detailed field surveys in three industries, characterized by GVCs, across eight countries, with a specific focus on low-income countries in Sub-Saharan Africa.
eBook
The internal geography of trade
Economic theory, including endogenous growth, the role of institutions, and, most importantly, the New Economic Geography (NEG), have made significant progress in explaining the emergence of core-periphery patterns behind this divergence. They point to the critical role of agglomeration, which confers benefits to metropolitan cores that have the advantages of large markets, deep labor pools, links to international markets, and clusters of diverse suppliers and institutions. Regions relatively near the metropolitan core are likely to benefit from spillovers and congestion-related dispersion. Regions further outside the core however, are not only less able to take advantage of spillovers, but also more likely to be far removed from key infrastructural, institutional, and interpersonal links to regional and international markets. As a result, they face significant challenges to becoming competitive locations to host economic activity. Thus the geographical pattern of core and peripheral regions is increasingly manifest in an economic pattern of 'leading' and 'lagging' regions
eBook
Human geography and the institutions that underlie economic growth
Human geography is in a unique position to understand how local structural factors shape social, political, and ultimately economic outcomes. Indeed, the discipline has had much to say about the interaction between local institutions and the economy in general, and about how the broader institutions of society influence local economic development. Yet, to date, geographers have for the most part avoided debates on more generalized theories of economic growth and development. With the increasing recognition — among sociologists, political scientists and even economists — that explaining economic growth robustly requires taking into account the role of both formal society-wide institutions and local and sometimes informal institutions, geographers are in a position to make an important contribution. In order to do so, however, they will need to take greater account of the theories and developments that are taking place outside the discipline. Using the framework of community and society as complementary structural forces shaping development trajectories, this paper presents a broad overview of the principal theoretical and empirical developments in the institutionalist approaches to economic development and identifies areas in which geographical research could contribute to them.
Journal Article
Special Economic Zones in Africa
This book, designed for policymakers, academics and researchers, and SEZ program practitioners, provides the first systematic and comprehensive analysis of SEZ programs in Sub-Saharan Africa. It is the result of detailed surveys and case studies conducted during 2009 in ten developing countries, including six in Sub-Saharan Africa. The book provides quantitative evidence of the performance of SEZs, and of the factors which contribute to that performance, highlighting the critical importance not just of the SEZ itself but of the wider national investment climate in which it functions. It also provides a comprehensive guide to the key policy questions that confront governments establishing SEZ programs, including: if and when to launch an SEZ program, what form of SEZ is most appropriate, and how to go about implementing it. Among the most important findings from the study that is stressed in the book is the shift from traditional enclave models of zones to SEZs that are integrated ? with national trade and industrial strategies, with core trade and social infrastructure, with domestic suppliers, and with local labor markets.Although the book focuses primarily on the experience of Sub-Saharan Africa, its lessons will be applicable to developing countries around the world.
eBook
Firm location and the determinants of exporting in low- and middle-income countries
Using a cross-section of more than 35,000 manufacturing and services firms in 76 low- and middle-income countries, we assess how firm location determines the likelihood of exporting. Results from a probit model show that, in addition to firmspecific characteristics, both regional investment climate and agglomeration factors have a significant impact on export participation. Export spillovers and industry diversity are associated with increased exporting, but the impact varies by location and sector. The analysis finds that firm-level determinants of exporting matter more for firms located in non-core regions, whereas regional determinants and agglomeration economies play a larger role in core regions.
Journal Article
