Read more about the article Capital, Labor, and Land in the Digital Transition

Capital, Labor, and Land in the Digital Transition

The digital revolution is bringing about a dramatic shift in power, from labor to capital. We assess what the impact of this transformation might be on land as a factor of production. The digital revolution is not happening in a historical vacuum. It unfolds within a framework of confrontation or collusion between market forces and government forces. Depending on the market power that companies can exercise, the digital transition will have different impacts on income distributions between capital, labor, and land, as well as on income distribution within capital itself. This digital transition is advancing during a period of history marked by the worsening of four major crises, the effects of which are interconnected: international, environmental, democratic, and distributive. Urban land management, based on collective purpose, must be recognized as a strategic asset in building a future in which progress is guided by equity, resilience, and social responsibility, with human dignity and the environment at the center of decisions.

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Read more about the article Pathways for Reconciling New Industrial Policy and International Cooperation for Global Goods

Pathways for Reconciling New Industrial Policy and International Cooperation for Global Goods

The resurgence of Neo protectionism as a reality is creating a pressing need to establish New Industrial Policies (NIPs) capable of striking a balance between Global Value Chains (GVC) managers' quest for efficiency and policy makers' need for more increasing resilience or national security in a turmoiled geopolitical landscape. Furthermore, although NIPs might pursue legitimate non-economic objectives, they are often captured by vested interests, resulting in protectionist measures. These policies produce negative spillovers, jeopardizing other countries’ development perspectives. This policy brief posits that countries embracing industrial policies with trade diversion components must allocate efforts to implement additional trade liberalization in sectors where the affected exporting countries have comparative advantages as compensation for the negative spillovers their unilateral domestic policies impose on third countries. This highlights the need to establish a structured system that penalizes protectionist countries for exceeding predetermined limits on subsidies and distortive measures. This policy brief also recommends that advanced economies implementing industrial policies with high amounts of embodied subsidies contribute to an international fund dedicated to financing developing economies' access to new green technologies. This approach acknowledges the undeniable push towards aggressive industrial policies, yet simultaneously strives to establish a framework to temper this emerging trend. This mechanism aligns with the principles of economic fairness and encourages nations to adopt less distortive behaviors in their pursuit of economic security or resilience to shocks.

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Read more about the article The Reform of the Global Financial Architecture: Toward a System that Delivers for the South

The Reform of the Global Financial Architecture: Toward a System that Delivers for the South

The Policy Center for the New South and the Atlantic Council Africa Center have jointly released a report on “The Reform of the Global Financial Architecture: Toward a System that Delivers for the South,” by Otaviano Canuto, Hafez Ghanem, Youssef El Jai, and Stéphane Le Bouder. This report issues specific and urgent calls for reform, including more representative global governance, increasing the World Bank’s operational and financial capacity, prioritizing programs that would integrate Africa into the global economy, connecting the continent’s critical infrastructure and trade routes, and increasing participation and collaboration with bilateral public and private lenders and investors, such as China, sovereign wealth funds, and multinationals. 2024 marks eighty years of the Bretton Woods system. It is crucial to implement extensive reforms and substantial policies to support African nations’ efforts and maximize their chances to unleash their immense economic potential. These recommendations presented during the 2024 IMF-World Bank Spring Meetings reflect the urgency of both operational and more inclusive reforms for the African continent.

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Read more about the article Podcast – There Are No Shortcuts to Economic Development

Podcast – There Are No Shortcuts to Economic Development

The Covid-19 crisis has led to major disruptions in Global Value Chains. In this episode, Otaviano Canuto answers questions about the impact on the design of post-covid industrial policies and underlines the components that should be considered by policymakers to ensure a quick and sound economic recovery along with a regional integration that plays a role in this new industrial organization scheme.

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Read more about the article Lost in transition: developing countries in the global economy

Lost in transition: developing countries in the global economy

The growth and productivity performance of emerging market and developing economies since the 2008 global financial crisis failed to repeat the achievements of the previous decade. Besides frustrating expectations that they might become the new growth pole in the global economy, their convergence to per capita incomes of advanced economies has suffered a setback. Nonetheless, the path of policies and reforms to be pursued in that direction remains the same. This is something accentuated by the coronavirus pandemic crisis.

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Read more about the article The Middle-Income Trap

The Middle-Income Trap

The “middle-income trap” has become a broad designation trying to capture the many cases of developing countries that succeeded in evolving from low- to middle-levels of per capita income, but then appeared to stall, losing momentum along the route toward the higher income levels of advanced economies. We need to approach middle-income countries as being in a complex transition phase between accumulation and innovation-based economies. Individual middle-income country experiences of falling into a “trap” may be approached as cases of lack of or failing performance in footing the bill in terms of appropriate policies and institutions.

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Read more about the article Trade globalization

Trade globalization

In the 1990s and 2000s, the world manufacturing production to a substantial extent moved from advanced countries to some developing countries. This was the result of the combination of an increase of the labor supply in the global market economy, trade opening, and technological transformations that allowed for fragmentation of production processes. As a result, foreign trade expanded, and world poverty diminished. Such trade globalization process stabilized in the 2010s and tends to be partially reversed by the new wave of technological changes.

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Read more about the article Climbing a High Ladder – Development in the Global Economy

Climbing a High Ladder – Development in the Global Economy

This book approaches the opportunities and challenges faced by developing countries to raise their per capita income levels during the recent phase of globalization. After dealing with the post-global financial crisis economic landscape in advanced economies, it deals with the windows of opportunity opened by trade and financial globalization for developing countries to climb the income ladder. Domestic preconditions for a developing country to benefit from those windows are then pointed out. China, Brazil, and Sub-Saharan Africa are presented as case studies. The book ends with an assessment of the impact of the coronavirus crisis on the global economy.

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Read more about the article Brazil, South Korea, and Global Value Chains: A Tale of Two Countries

Brazil, South Korea, and Global Value Chains: A Tale of Two Countries

South Korea has climbed the income per capita ladder up to high levels, while Brazil may be considered a case of a “middle-income trap”. Such divergence of economic growth performances can be related to their distinctive approaches to global value chains and trade globalization, as well as to domestic accumulation of technological and organizational capabilities.

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Read more about the article Lost in Transition – Developing Countries in the Global Economy

Lost in Transition – Developing Countries in the Global Economy

The growth and productivity performance of emerging market and developing economies (EMDEs) in the last 10 years failed to repeat the achievements of the previous decade. Besides frustrating expectations that they might become the new growth pole in the global economy, their convergence to per capita incomes of advanced economies has suffered a setback. Nonetheless, the path of policies and reforms to be pursued in that direction remains the same.

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Read more about the article A importância da articulação continental para a promoção do desenvolvimento

A importância da articulação continental para a promoção do desenvolvimento

Otaviano Canuto – A importância da articulação continental para a promoção do desenvolvimento Palestra inaugural - 1º Encontro de Economistas-Chefe dos Bancos de Desenvolvimento da América Latina BDMG, Belo Horizonte, MG, Brasil - 20 de setembro de 2019

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Read more about the article Natural wealth and economic growth – the case of sub-Saharan Africa

Natural wealth and economic growth – the case of sub-Saharan Africa

This note approaches the relationship between natural wealth and economic growth, using the case of Sub-Sahara African economies as an illustration. Delving into recent World Bank reports, it highlights how a sustained positive correlation between natural capital and GDP growth happens through the transformation of the former into other forms of assets: produced capital, human capital and other intangible assets. Governance features and the quality of macroeconomic policies are of the essence for such a benign trajectory to take place.

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Read more about the article Middle Income Countries and Multilateral Development Banks: Traps on the Way to Graduation

Middle Income Countries and Multilateral Development Banks: Traps on the Way to Graduation

Multilateral Development Banks (MDBs) have two financing windows, with different terms, dedicated to low- and middle-income countries. Countries are presumed to cross those windows as their income per capita rises, with middle-income countries (MICs) eventually “graduating” to a non-client status once they reach some criteria. However, due to what may be called “middle-income traps”, such progression toward graduation has been limited to a small number of countries. In this paper, we suggest areas where the support by MDBs would yield highest results toward “graduation” of MICs. Item 1 reviews the criteria that have been used to justify graduation, whereas item 2 approaches two ways by which the possibility of “middle-income traps” impeding such graduation has been discussed in the literature. Finally, item 3 proposes an interface between MDBs’ support to MICs and the policy agenda to overcome middle-income traps.

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Read more about the article China’s Rebalancing Act is Slowly Addressing Sliding Growth Figures
SAO PAULO, SP, BRASIL, 22-11-2016: Entrevista com Otaviano Canuto, diretor do Banco Mundial (Foto: Fabio Braga/Folhapress, MERCADO)***EXCLUSIVO***.

China’s Rebalancing Act is Slowly Addressing Sliding Growth Figures

  Capital Finance International (Spring, 2019) China’s economic growth has been sliding since 2011, while its economic structure has gradually rebalanced toward lower dependence on investments and current-account surpluses. Steadiness…

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