Those of us interested in private sector development as a way of achieving sustainable growth and shared prosperity are often confronted with two harsh truths: public sector partners are constrained by limited resources and capacity, corruption and rent-seeking; and private sector partners are ultimately driven by profit maximization. Squaring that circle is of particular importance in developing economies, where successfully leveraging private sector incentives in support of public interest can have outsized impact.
“This can’t be Karamoja,” I thought, looking around me. I had read the reports, which focus on the vulnerability and poverty of this region in northern Uganda, home to the Karamojong, a nomadic people with their own language, traditions, and customs. But it’s one thing to read about a place, and quite another to visit it. Karamoja was stunningly beautiful: there were boulders the size of mountains scattered across the horizon, vibrant green bushes and pasture atop red clay earth, and uninterrupted blue skies.
Recently, I had traveled to Karamoja on a field trip to review the implementation of a government safety net, the Third Northern Uganda Social Action Fund (NUSAF III), which had scaled up in response to the recent drought.
Uganda’s population is predominantly rural and is limited in its ability to cope with production shocks. The country’s smallholder farmers, and especially the poorest 40% of households, are extremely vulnerable to drought [Uganda poverty study, WB 2016]. Drought response in Uganda has primarily been financed by international donors and delivered through humanitarians and NGOs, with the government playing a coordination role. This ad hoc, reactive approach presents drawbacks, including delayed response.
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Dynamic entrepreneurs supported by the North-South incubator Bond’Innov. Photo Credit: Bond’Innov
Across francophone Africa, incubators are emerging rapidly to support a new generation of young entrepreneurs. Despite their huge potential, however, incubators are just one of many players in a typical entrepreneurial ecosystem. So it is increasingly important that incubators — in addition to allocating the necessary resources, services and funding to worthy start-ups — provide them with a platform to share and transfer knowledge across the ecosystem, not only with each other but also with the investors, research centers and industry experts upon which their businesses will ultimately depend.
As with Impact Hub Bamako, incubators can be part of broader international franchises, while others are anchored by academic, public or private bodies (or some hybrid of the three) and may already be associated with other incubators. Bond’innov, for example, is an incubator that promotes entrepreneurship cooperation between the global North and the South and that is headquartered in Paris and located on-campus with the Institute for Development Research, a large multidisciplinary research organization operating in more than 50 developing countries.
For decades, various governments around the world have used trade-distorting policies (tariff and non-tariff barriers) to support the development of local automotive industries that would not have otherwise been economically viable. However, to what extent are these policies, which once helped attract market-seeking automakers (or Original Equipment Manufacturers: OEMs), still serving the interests of these countries is uncertain.
In fact, for India and Pakistan, two of the biggest South Asian automotive producers, a recent World Bank Group report highlights that such polices might be reducing competitiveness and slowing down the spread of world-class good practices in the value chain. These effects need to considered carefully. A process of reform via gradual reduction of import tariffs and convergence with international environmental and safety standards is recommended to enhance competitiveness of this sector.
In the automotive sector, India is the world’s sixth-largest auto producer by volume, but it owns less than 1 percent of global export markets compared with more than 3 percent for China, 4.5 percent for Korea and 7 percent for Mexico. The average auto firm in India exported only 5 percent of its total sales, compared to 16 percent in China. Productivity levels in India are one-third the levels in China, and this gap persists for OEMs that are sub-scale, with below-average investment in innovation and skills, and with low participation in global value chains (GVCs). All these factors were discussed in a previous Private Sector Development blog post. The situation is worse in Pakistan, with lower levels of exports and productivity, and with similar factors driving it.
Trade policies, through tariff and non-tariff barriers, play an important role in shaping the external environment, which in turn influences a firm’s incentive to become more productive (or not). Firms facing greater competition in their product markets are inclined to raise the minimum productivity threshold to operate profitably and reduce inefficiencies. They do this both through investing in productivity-enhancing activities and through reducing costs, which in turn helps them capture greater market shares. Competition also helps reallocate resources from the less-productive to the more-productive firms, increasing the incentives for all firms to invest in the within-firm productivity levers such as innovation and skills.
Start-ups are transforming cities. Entrepreneurs are inspiring creative communities and transforming the social and economic landscape of the neighborhoods where they cluster.
What drives entrepreneurs together and creates these communities? To answer this question, we looked at catalysts of entrepreneurial communities in cities around the world. The team found that a range of spaces — such as innovation hubs, incubators, maker spaces and fab labs — are at the core of these communities. They represent the main link between entrepreneurs and the broader economic and social fabric of the city. We call these “Creative Community Spaces” (CCS).
How are these CCS helping transform our cities? We compiled a set of case studies from around the world and analyzed their impact. There are more details in this report.
Explaining the idea factory through Legos at the Strengthening Lebanon’s Mobile Internet Ecosystem workshops. Photo by Shamir Vasdev / World Bank
The corporate world is at the forefront of the tech-led transformation of the economy. The democratization of technology, whereby exponential cost reductions have allowed almost anyone to produce tech-based innovations, is disrupting core sectors of the economy.
Technology disruption is not confined anymore to the digital world. Data analytics, artificial intelligence, 3-D printing, robotics, sensorization, and an ever-evolving list of technology platforms have blurred the boundaries that once-protected physical ("brick and mortar") sectors, such as the hospitality, automobile, construction and manufacturing sectors.
Business as usual has not served companies in these sectors well. Traditional innovation models to create products and services do not match the pace and agility of competitive disruption from tech actors (e.g., large technology platforms with unbeatable access to data access and capital, such as Google or Amazon, and small and agile local startups). Thus, a new corporate innovation model, “Corporate Innovation 2.0,” is emerging.
The main characteristic of this new model is that it’s open by nature, as opposed to having a closed R&D process. Established companies tend to offer good structures for marketing, distribution, processes, scaling up products, etc., but, compared to start-ups, they often have a weakness in generating and rapidly applying creativity to develop new products and services.
Using open innovation techniques, corporations are trying to address this weakness by absorbing start-up innovation. We have seen three main types of mechanisms in this emerging model: corporate accelerators, competitions to generate new ideas, and co-creation with startups of new products and services.
For several decades, manufacturing in the automotive sector has made a strong contribution to spurring national growth, to promoting technology acquisition, and to raising incomes for workers across skill levels in developing economies as well as in developed nations. In India – the world’s sixth-largest producer of cars, where the automotive sector has been growing but at well below its tremendous potential – productivity levels would need to increase rapidly. A wave of autonomous functionality in vehicles and other technology-driven disruptions are not far away with the involvement of tech giants like Google, Tesla, and Uber. This makes the need to improve productivity in order to respond quickly to changing environments even more critical for traditional automakers.
Some long-awaited reforms in India to improve automotive manufacturing performance came through this year. In July, the Government of India implemented a unified Goods and Services Tax (GST) regime to replace the multiple taxes that had been levied, in the past, by the state and central governments. This makes for a more integrated market, with uniformity in tax rates where automakers will be helped by easier compliance, the removal of cascading effect of taxes and the reduction of the costs of doing business. Reinforcing this, the union budget allocation in February allows for more investments in roads and highways, farm-friendly policies and income-tax reform for the middle class. Those steps will increase demand for small passenger vehicles and for the farm-equipment segment. This is all good news for the automakers in India.
Still, much more needs to be done to increase overall productivity in this job-creating and technology-rich sector. According to a recently published report by the World Bank Group, entitled “Automotive in South Asia: From Fringe to Global,” productivity (measured by value added per worker) in India’s auto sector remains less than one-third the level of China. From 1993 to 2004, the growth rate of Total Factor Productivity in China’s automotive sector was 6.1 percent per year, compared to only 1.1 percent in India. The growth rate of labor productivity was 9.8 percent per year in China, compared to 3.1 percent in India. Even though India has been increasing production of units at 11 percent to 15 percent per year (from 2005 through 2015) , it could do much better on improving productivity levels.
Zimbabwe is not known as an economic dynamo in Africa. In fact, most people who know anything about the country probably have the opposite impression. Yet not so long ago, Zimbabwe was the bread basket of Africa – endowed with amazingly fertile land, abundant mineral resources, and one of the best educated populations on the continent.
Over the last few years, there has been a lot of excitement around the potential impact of digital technologies to solve challenges and create jobs in the developing world. Those championing this strategy for growth and development have turned to young entrepreneurs with wildly imaginative ideas that just might work — if only they had a little business training.
Since 2011, infoDev has been piloting entrepreneurship support programs across the globe and has helped establish a network of mLabs to support digital entrepreneurs. A 2014 assessment report, Do mLabs make a difference? found that these specialized incubators had helped develop nearly a hundred start-ups and created over 280 jobs. Our team returned to the mLabs to conduct a follow-up assessment and uncovered some interesting findings about their impact.
