What African Industrial Development Can Learn from East Asian Successes : The Role of Complexity and Economic Fitness
The path to becoming an advanced economy can be a difficult one that is fraught with obstacles, traps, and frequent reversals. Yet in the past half century several East Asian nations have completed the journey by increasing their ‘economic fitness’...
| Main Authors: | , , |
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| Format: | Brief |
| Language: | English |
| Published: |
International Finance Corporation, Washington, DC
2020
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| Subjects: | |
| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/594721606369837976/What-African-Industrial-Development-Can-Learn-from-East-Asian-Successes-The-Role-of-Complexity-and-Economic-Fitness http://hdl.handle.net/10986/34852 |
| Summary: | The path to becoming an advanced economy
can be a difficult one that is fraught with obstacles,
traps, and frequent reversals. Yet in the past half century
several East Asian nations have completed the journey by
increasing their ‘economic fitness’, implementing structural
changes and leveraging their comparative advantages.
Complexity and Economic Fitness is a methodology that
measures the stage of an economy’s development and suggests
feasible upgrades to more sophisticated production and
diversity, which can lead to greater global competitiveness.
This note highlights the East Asian lessons that African
nations, and Ethiopia in particular, are putting to use.
These include focusing on competitiveness in select
industries, acquiring know-how from global leaders, seeking
foreign partners and investment, and developing a national
strategy to create the industries of the future. The
application of these lessons is also of interest to private
investors, as it can allow them to identify the economies
utilizing Economic Fitness analyses and thus offer
opportunities for growth and investment. |
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