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Following decolonization, growth accelerated in the leading African economies with the emergence of industrial activity, the modernization of physical infrastructure, and the quickening of urbanization. However, by the mid-1970s this initial phase of catching up had run out of steam, and African countries entered a long economic twilight that extended through the mid-1990s. Since then, and for over a decade, Africa, has benefitted from a widely shared revival of economic activity. Some reasons for this revival are shared worldwide, including globalization, innovations triggered by the advent of the Internet and advances in semiconductor/digital technologies, expansionary monetary policies, and by the growth of Asian countries that accelerated industrialization and trade volume. Other causes are internal to Africa, such as greater stability, better-managed macroeconomic policy, more open economies, and improved human development indicators. But this new-found momentum cannot be taken for granted. In particular, the financial crisis of 2008–09 has weakened Africa’s principal Western trading partners. Export-led growth is no longer the recipe for all seasons. This paper sketches a strategy for African late starters that identifies the key objectives and policy initiatives appropriate for a post-financial-crisis environment where South-South trade and capital flows are taking on a greater salience.

This note examines one of the most fundamental questions to emerge from the Great Recession of 2007–9: how to regrow global economic growth going forward? Although all are painfully aware that it may be 2013 or 2014 before the global economy returns to normalcy, no one is sanguine about medium- to long-term growth prospects. For this reason, the challenging task of “regrowing growth” will take center stage for politicians and policy makers alike. One point is clear: without a resurrection of strong economic growth in major economies, the likelihood of rapid economic development in poor developing countries is diminished.1 How various elements will affect growth prospects is less clear, but vitally important. In the terminology of Hausmann and Rodrik (2003), this is a process of discovery and we are in somewhat uncharted territory.

Chile could well have space to increase its growth potential by 2 percentage points of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) per year. To do this, it would need to pay more attention to new sources of growth in natural resources, manufacturing, and services. In an increasingly globalized world, first-mover advantages have become more numerous and larger. Chile risks losing out, as a few recent high-profile cases suggest. Chile's total factor productivity growth can be raised by driving within-firm technological change closer to the global best-practice frontier more rapidly, especially in manufacturing. This would encourage the diversification of exports and boost Chile's supply response to global demand changes. Chile confronts obstacles in its processes of innovation, human capital accumulation, and investment. To overcome them, deep institutional changes are needed to develop a national innovation system, stronger and more equitable educational achievement, more flexible labor markets, and focused public investments that crowd in private business. Such an inclusive growth strategy is likely to yield better social outcomes than a strategy that attempts to confront social inequities head-on through more equitable access to public services without paying adequate attention to the demand for labor and generation of income. Chile could also try a new policy towards innovation, but it would need to be bolder in terms of the institutional design to maximize the chances of success.

Efforts to reform utilities can affect poor households in varied, often complex, ways, but it is by no means certain that such reform will hurt vulnerable households. Many myths have been perpetuated in discussions of utility reform - and in many cases poor households have benefited from reform. What is amazing is the extent to which governments, and their advisors - sometimes including multilateral organizations - fail to measure, anticipate, and monitor how the privatization of utilities actually affects the poor. Many questions must still be answered before good general guidelines can be drawn, but the authors offer many suggestions about how social, regulatory, and privatization policy, can increase the benefits of utility reform for poor households. The good news is that many measures can be taken to improve the chances that poor households will benefit from reform. Chief among these is promoting competition, where possible. Essentially what is needed is political commitment to doing the right thing. If policy is weak before privatization, it is going to be weak after privatization as well. Privatization is no substitute for responsible policy on redistribution.

The success with which middle-income indebted developing countries have gained access to private international finance in the 1990s is a tribute to their own domestic economic performance, international policy in dealing with the debt crisis of the 1980s, and innovation in international financial markets. Emphasizing the role of private infrastructure investment as a vehicle for attracting foreign capital to developing countries in the 1990s, the authors develop an analysis model to examine what determines the credit-risk premium on infrastructure projects in the country-risk environment of developing countries. They also provide tentative quantitative evidence of the importance of macroeconomic and project-specific attributes of project risk. Their key finding is that the market seems to impose a high-risk premium on loans to countries with high inflation and to projects in the road sector.