The Unassuming Economist

Max Walter, the executive director of Centre for Development Alternatives (a Uganda based independent think tank) writes for the Brookings Institution about the revival of industrial policy for pushing growth in Africa. Governments across the continent are using industrial policy tools to push for industrialization through agro-processing, labour-intensive light manufacturing, natural resource extraction and value addition, some knowledge-intensive manufacturing, and “industries without smokestacks” such as high-value agriculture and tradable services.

The article explores reasons which may have driven this revival and then moves on to explain some notable examples. From Uganda’s National Development Plan (2020) which focuses on the use of several industrial policy tools for bolstering supply chains of cocoa production, to Morocco and South Africa’s policies to upgrade automobile manufacturing industries- examples are aplenty.

The article also delves into the importance of failures of such policies for evidence-based strategic policymaking.

Click here to read the full column.

Economists Christian Gayer and Andreas Reuter of the European Commission (EC) and Fiona Morice of the French National Institute of Statistics and Economic Studies write about the EC’s new index of uncertainty in a recent column for the VoxEU blog.

For the lack of a better indicator, economists have often resorted to measuring uncertainty using proxies like deviation of agents’ views on economic outlooks or forecast errors. However, this new index aims to study the evolution of uncertainty in response to the Covid-19 pandemic and related stringent restrictions based on the EU-wide Programme of Business and Consumer Surveys. It also compares the indicator to survey-based indicators of economic confidence, as well as to other existing uncertainty gauges, and offers a glimpse of the rich set of geographical, sectoral, and sub-sectoral breakdowns of the new data.

The column dives deeper into the levels of analysis possible using disaggregated data on various parameters that it presents, such as at the industrial and sub-sectoral level, for consumers grouped by several socio-economic categories etc., and then discusses some key insights.

Click here to read the full blog.