Africa’s industrial progress has been disappointing. Part of the reason is that labor costs are higher than one might expect, given GDP per capita. Alan Gelb, Christian Meyer, and Vijaya Ramachandran distill the policy lessons.
Biometric identification is spreading rapidly across the developing world, where it is helping to close the “identification gap” that separates poor countries from rich ones. India’s Unique Identification (UID) project offers important lessons for other countries.
This brief outlines how to implement a results-based approach in a way consistent with the World Bank’s recent experience with results-based disbursement, including its approval of the new Program for Results (PforR) instrument.
This paper surveys 160 cases where biometric identification has been used for economic, political, and social purposes in developing countries. One primary conclusion is that identification should be considered as a component of development policy, rather than being seen as just a cost on a program-by-program basis.
India’s Universal ID program seeks to provide a unique identity to all 1.2 billion residents. Its successes and potential failures will have far-reaching implications for other developing countries looking to create national identity systems.
Pedro L. Rodríguez, José R. Morales, and Francisco J. Monaldi ask whether the direct and automatic distribution of oil rents to citizens is a viable option in Venezuela.
This paper discusses the evolution of India's Universal ID program, the innovative organization and pathbreaking technology behind it, how it is being rolled out, and how robust ID is beginning to be used.
The authors find that the value of discovered reserves is high relative to the costs of exploration and that many countries can continue to generate resource rents far longer than indicated by current reserve estimates. In some cases, public measures to encourage private exploration may be justified.
Uganda has sought to finance its development agenda with oil since discovering the resource in its Albertine Lakes Basin in 2009. This paper considers alternative methods for distributing the rents from oil that mitigate some of the governance risks associated with natural resource revenues.
To inform the Millennium Challenge Corporation’s review of its country selection process, the MCA Monitor has conducted a parallel review and offers five key recommendations.
This paper surveys the arguments for and against cash-transfer programs in resource-rich states, discusses some of the new biometric identification technologies, and reaches preliminary conclusions about their potentially very large benefits for developing countries.
This paper offers a proposal to improve performance-based allocation systems of International Development Association (IDA) donors and others to better address the needs of fragile states and better link development allocations with performance.
This paper argues for approaches that increase public understanding of the need for prudent spending of oil revenues in booms, and for comprehensive consideration of a range of options for using rents. Drawing on the experience of a few successful countries, it points to a number of common factors that seem to be important in enabling countries to obtain a positive payoff from resource wealth. These include a strong concern for social stability and growth, a capable and engaged technocracy, and interests in the non-oil sectors able to act as agents of restraint.
Why do so many businesses choose to remain informal? Vijaya Ramachandran and co-authors discover that the answer is more nuanced than often believed. In East Africa, for instance, the difference in productivity between formal and informal firms is often indistinguishable, while in Southern Africa productivity it is more differentiated. Policies to encourage formalization and increase productivity are likely to be more successful in East Africa, whereas an emphasis on job training and vocational skills might be more appropriate in Southern Africa.
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This CGD Brief, based on the book Africa's Private Sector by Vijaya Ramachandran, Alan Gelb, and Manju Kedia Shah, shows how investing in infrastructure and improving access to education can help bring about a broad-based business class in Africa.
What's keeping private business from flourishing in Africa? On the basis of unique enterprise surveys, Vijaya Ramachandran and her co-authors identify poor roads and unreliable power as major physical challenges; ethnic segmentation and the economic predominance ethnic minorities further constrain the business environment. The author show how investing in infrastructure and improving access to education can help bring about a broad-based business class in Africa.
This paper ties together the macroeconomic and microeconomic evidence on the competitiveness of African manufacturing sectors. The conceptual framework is based on the newer theories that see the evolution of comparative advantage as influenced by the business climate—a key public good—and by external economies between clusters of firms entering in related sectors. Macroeconomic data from purchasing power parity (PPP), though imprecisely measured, estimates confirms that Africa is high-cost relative to its levels of income and productivity. This finding is compared with firm-level evidence from surveys undertaken for Investment Climate Assessments in 2000-2004.