Justin Yifu Lin's blog

In his hit My Valentine, former Beatle Sir Paul McCartney sings about a Moroccan vacation where foul weather meant he and his love could not enjoy the vacation and planned sightseeing they had envisioned. Sir Paul was frustrated, until his love said the weather mattered little and they should change their mindset and make the most of it. That advice inspired the opening lyrics of his tune -- What if it rained?/ We didn't care/ She said that someday soon/ The sun was gonna shine/ And she was right/ This love of mine,/ My Valentine -- and taught him a valuable lesson: Complaining about the missing ingredients necessary to achieve any goal is a waste. It is far better to focus on what is already available and make the most of things.

Former Soviet Union leader Joseph Stalin and famous Irish writer Oscar Wilde had very little in common. Yet they agreed on one thing: the importance of ideas in human life. The former once said: “Ideas are more powerful than guns. We would not let our enemies have guns, why should we let them have ideas?” The latter boldly wrote that “An idea that is not dangerous is unworthy of being called an idea at all.” My colleagues who serve as regional chief economists at the Bank -- Shanta Devarajan, Kalpana Kochhar, Indermit Gill -- also agree with me that ideas drive various societal transformations. Nevertheless, they disagree with me on several points, as highlighted in their joint post on Africa Can. We all want to generate and channel the best knowledge on development to policymakers around the world who have been struggling for centuries—if not millennia—to lift their people out of poverty.

Reducing poverty and climbing the ladder to prosperity aren’t easy: From 1950-2008, only 28 economies in the world have reduced their gaps with US by 10 percent or more. Among those 28 economies, only 12 are non-European and non-oil exporters. Such a small number is sobering: It means that most countries have been trapped in middle-income or low-income status. As development economists, we must find a way to help them improve their performance so that our dream of “a world free of poverty” can be realized and they can close the gap with the high-income countries.

Given worldwide concern over jobs, it makes sense that the 2013 World Development Report (WDR) is on jobs. According the ILO, though growth has resumed in some regions, the global employment situation is bleak and shows no sign of recovery in the near term. 
 
The WDR, which is being launched this autumn, will posit that jobs are more than what people earn or what they do at work -- they are also part of who they are.  With that in mind, the report will use a jobs lens to look at multiple outcomes associated with jobs – how they contribute to living standards, productivity and social cohesion.

Even though “The golden age of finance has now ended,” (Barry Eichengreen in  reference to the Great Recession),  the golden age of industrialization in the developing world has just begun.

In a recent paper,'Leading Dragons phenomenon: new opportunities for catch-up in low-income countries,' Vandana Chandra, Yan Wang and I have presented evidence on how modern economic development is accompanied by structural transformation from an agrarian to an industrial economy and occurs through a process of continuous industrial and technological upgrading. Since the 18th century, all countries that industrialized successfully in Europe, North America and East Asia had two features in common: one, they exploited their  comparative advantage; and two, they leveraged the late-comer advantage to emulate the industrial upgrading patterns of countries richer than them.  Except for a few oil exporting countries, no country has achieved a high-income status without industrializing.  In general, a change in GDP per capita is strongly and positively correlated with growth in value added in the manufacturing sector (figure 1).  If a natural resource- or land-rich country has achieved a middle income status without a large manufacturing sector, it has rarely succeeded in sustaining growth.

I visited three African countries – Ethiopia, Rwanda, and South Africa– during my first week as Chief Economist at the World Bank in June 2008. Many visits to other African countries followed, but Ethiopia holds for me a special interest. I’ve just visited again, for a fourth time. While I am sure I will go back again after I depart the Bank on June 1 this year, this was my final visit to Africa as Chief Economist.

Over four years, I’ve seen Ethiopia gradually embrace structural transformation and its practical application. Leaders there are acutely aware that, if they are to maintain a robust growth rate (GDP growth has been around 10.5% on average over the past few years), they must move away from agriculture, the dominant sector, toward industrial upgrading and technological innovation, often by imitating economies just a few rungs up the economic ladder.  Ethiopia’s agriculture sector is important and should not be neglected, but that alone won’t get the country onto a path toward middle income and finally to high income status.

A clear pattern of 'two speed recovery' emerged from the global economic crisis: although the East Asian economies saw a drop of nearly 4 percentage points in their GDP growth to 8.5 percent in 2008 and a further decline to 7.5 percent in 2009, they rebounded quickly to 9.7 percent in 2010. At the same time, however, growth in high income countries fell by 6.6 percentage points during 2008-09, from 2.7 percent in 2007 to -3.9 in 2009. Moreover, these economies are not yet out of the woods given the sovereign debt crises in the Euro Area.  This is one of the many fascinating patterns revealed in the newly updated online version of the World Development Indicators.

What is more striking is that low income countries (LICs) have been resilient during the crises, more so than in the past.  The annual GDP growth rate for low income countries declined less than 1 percentage point in 2008, standing at 4.7 percent in 2009 and quickly recovered to 5.9 percent in 2010.  In particular, Ethiopia, Mozambique, Tanzania, and Zambia have shown robust growth of 6 to 11 percent throughout this period. Similar conclusions were presented in Didier, Hevia and Schmukler April 2011.

As a counterpoint to grim forecasts coming out of Europe, I am hopeful that we can anticipate an Asian century where China will grow dynamically for another 20 years. Yet there are caveats to this optimistic scenario: Success in China will require a process of continual transformation and the wherewithal to tackle what I describe as a triple imbalance at the national level. I expound on this and other points in a BBC viewpoint piece published on November 23.

I was in Berlin a few weeks ago and did an interview with Tagesspiegel and wanted to share it in English with readers, as interest in China is so strong these days. I think this Question and Answer session with the journalist Harald Schumann reflects well the questions many Europeans have on their minds...

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Der Tagesspiegel Interview by Harald Schumann
November 21, 2011

“Even China has to step on the breaks” // World Bank Chief Economist Justin Yifu Lin about the effect  of the debt crisis on the world economy, China’s reserves and the Communists’ flexibility.

Mr. Lin, as a result of the debt crisis in some euro-states, Europe risks to sink back into a recession. What effect will this have on the world economy?