William F. Maloney - Böcker

Analyzing the experience of Mexico under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the authors draw lessons for other countries considering free trade agreements with the United States. The authors conclude that NAFTA raised external trade and foreign investment inflows and had a modest effect on Mexico's average income per person. It is likely that NAFTA also helped achieve a modest reduction in poverty and an improvement in job quality. However, major obstacles remain to Mexico's long term development-NAFTA is not enough. The main lesson for other countries is that free trade agreements offer opportunities to accelerate economic growth, but do not guarantee it.

Analyzing the experience of Mexico under the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), the authors draw lessons for other countries considering free trade agreements with the United States. The authors conclude that NAFTA raised external trade and foreign investment inflows and had a modest effect on Mexico's average income per person. It is likely that NAFTA also helped achieve a modest reduction in poverty and an improvement in job quality. However, major obstacles remain to Mexico's long term development-NAFTA is not enough. The main lesson for other countries is that free trade agreements offer opportunities to accelerate economic growth, but do not guarantee it.

For almost as long as economics has been a profession, the role of natural resources in the promotion of economic growth has been among the core issues of development theory. Some newer theories suggest that natural riches produce institutional weaknesses as various social groups attempt to capture the economic rents derived from the exploitation of natural resources. Since the 1960s, some analysts have argued that resource-rich developing countries have grown more slowly than other developing countries. Nevertheless, we find ourselves in a time when conventional wisdom again postulates that natural resources are indeed riches. This book brings together a variety of analytical perspectives, ranging from econometric analyses of economic growth to historical studies of successful development experiences in countries with abundant natural resources. The evidence suggests that natural resources are neither a curse nor destiny. Natural resources can actually spur economic development when combined with the accumulation of knowledge for economic innovation.Furthermore, natural resource abundance need not be the only determinant of the structure of trade in developing countries. In fact, the accumulation of knowledge, infrastructure, and the quality of governance all seem to determine not only what countries produce and export, but how firms and workers produce any good.

Economists have long argued that developing countries have the potential for high productivity growth if they adopt existing technologies and apply them to the local context. This report brings to bear a battery of new data sources to explore the innovation ""paradox"": despite the potential for very high returns, developing countries invest far less in adopting and inventing new processes and products than advanced countries. The report posits three broad factors underlying this paradox. The first is that firms in developing countries lack the managerial and technological capabilities to undertake meaningful innovation projects. This implies that conventional innovation policies are unlikely to be effective, and moving firms up the ""capabilities escalator"" becomes central. A second factor is that firm capability is only one of many critical ingredients - for instance, access to financial markets, macroeconomic stability, and imported machinery - that are complements to the innovation process, and whose absence lowers the return to innovation in developing countries. This implies that cultivating an effective innovation system will be a greater policy challenge, and that standard measures of innovation performance, such as research and development or GDP, are misleading. Finally, government capabilities required to redress these two points are also correspondingly weaker in developing countries, so building these capabilities needs to be explicitly integrated in formulating innovation policy.

The stagnation of productivity in the developing world, and indeed, across the globe, over the last two decades dictates a rethinking of productivity measurement, analysis, and policy. Reviving Global Productivity presents a “second wave” of thinking in three key areas of productivity analysis and its implications for productivity policies.The volume calls into question the measurement and relevance of distortions as the primary barrier to productivity growth, urges a broader concept of firm performance that goes beyond efficiency to quality upgrading and demand expansion, and explores what it takes to generate an experimental and innovative society where entrepreneurs have the personal characteristics to identify new technologies and manage risk within an entrepreneurial ecosystem that facilitates their doing so. It also reviews arguments surrounding industrial policies.The authors argue for an integrated approach to productivity analysis that incorporates both the need to reduce economic distortions and generate the human capital capable of identifying the opportunities offered to follower countries and upgrade firm capabilities. Finally, it offers guidance on prioritizing policies when there is uncertainty around diagnostics and limited government capability.

This book documents frontier knowledge on the drivers of agriculture productivity to derive pragmatic policy advice for governments and development partners on reducing poverty and boosting shared prosperity. The analysis describes global trends and long-term sources of total factor productivity growth, along with broad trends in partial factor productivity for land and labor, revisiting the question of scale economies in farming. Technology is central to growth in agricultural productivity, yet across many parts of the developing world, readily available technology is never taken up. We investigate demand-side constraints of the technology equation to analyze factors that might influence producers, particularly poor producers, to adopt modern technology. Agriculture and food systems are rapidly transforming, characterized by shifting food preferences, the rise and growing sophistication of value chains, the increasing globalization of agriculture, and the expanding role of the public and private sectors in bringing about efficient and more rapid productivity growth. In light of this transformation, the analysis focuses on the supply side of the technology equation, exploring how the enabling environment and regulations related to trade and intellectual property rights stimulate Research and Development to raise productivity. The book also discusses emerging developments in modern value chains that contribute to rising productivity. This book is the fourth volume of the World Bank Productivity Project, which seeks to bring frontier thinking on the measurement and determinants of productivity to global policy makers.