The Practice of Industrial Policy ─ Government-Business Coordination in Africa and East Asia

Much of the information relevant to policy formulation for industrial development is held by the private sector, not by public officials. There is therefore fairly broad agreement in the development literature that some form of structured engagement, often referred to as close or strategic coordination, between the public and private sectors is needed, both to assist in the design of appropriate policies and to provide feedback on their implementation. There is less agreement on how that engagement should be structured, how its objectives should be defined, and how success should be measured. In fact, the academic literature on close coordination provides little practical guidance on how governments interested in developing a framework for government business engagement should go about doing it.

The burden of this lack of guidance falls most heavily on Africa, where despite 20 years of growth lack of structural transformation has slowed job creation and the pace of poverty reduction. Increasingly, African governments are seeking to design and implement policies to encourage the more rapid growth of high productivity industries and in the process confronting the need to engage constructively with the private sector. These efforts have met with mixed results. For sustained success in structural transformation, new policies and new approaches to government-business coordination will be needed.

In 2014 the Korea International Cooperation Agency and UNU-WIDER launched a joint research project on 'The Practice of Industrial Policy'. The objective of the project was to help African policy-makers develop better coordination between the public and private sectors in order to identify the constraints to faster structural transformation and to design, implement, and monitor policies to remove them. This book, written by national researchers and international experts, presents the results of that research.

John Page, Senior Fellow, Global Economy and Development, The Brookings Institution,Finn Tarp, Director, UNU-WIDER and Professor of Development Economics, University of Copenhagen

John Page is a Senior Fellow in the Global Economy and Development Program at the Brookings Institution and a Non-resident Senior Fellow of the UNU World Institute for Development Economics Research (UNU-WIDER). He is also visiting professor at the National Graduate Institute for Policy Studies, Tokyo, Japan and a Research Associate of the Centre for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University. From 1980 to 2008 he was at the World Bank where his senior positions included: Director, Poverty Reduction, Director, Economic Policy, and Chief Economist, Africa. He is the author of several books and more than 100 published papers on economic development.

Finn Tarp is Director of UNU-WIDER and Professor of Development Economics at the University of Copenhagen. He has some four decades of experience in academic and applied development economics research, teaching, and policy analysis. His field experience covers more than 20 years of in-country assignments in 35 countries across the developing world, including longer-term assignments in Swaziland, Mozambique, Zimbabwe, and Viet Nam. Finn Tarp has published widely in leading international academic journals alongside a series of books, and he is a member of the World Bank Chief Economist's 'Council of Eminent Persons'.