Growth
Introduction
Can Free Trade Agreements support ‘Factory Asia’?
Free trade agreements (FTAs) have been proliferating in Asia for more than a decade. Production networks and the product-fragmentation trade that they generate have been growing for a much longer period. In fact, since ‘Factory Asia’ emerged, well before FTAs (Baldwin 2008). They are clearly not necessary for the formation of production networks, but can they support production networks’ further growth and/or spread?
Empirical studies cannot provide a clear answer because they produce mixed results, possibly reflecting dual causality – growth in fragmentation trade may be inducing FTAs, or...
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May 15, 2013
Africa must add value to its vast natural resources
Although a number of African countries have experienced rapid economic growth over the past decade, substantial developmental challenges remain.
According to the World Bank’s latest World Development Indicators, Africa has recorded almost 20 years of continuous decline in extreme poverty, from 60% in 1993 to 48% in 2010, yet the region is still home to a third of the world’s extreme poor, defined as people who live on US$ 1.25 per day or less.
That being said, the economic outlook for the continent remains positive, underpinned by improving political stability and governance, the growing...
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May 10, 2013
Paving a new silk road through Africa
Unreliable as they might come in Africa, statistics all indicate that the continent is ready to take off economically. Six out of the 10 fastest growing economies over the past decade were African – a fact that has too easily been overlooked in the shadow of much more publicized growth numbers in China and India. Foreign direct investment into Africa has grown more than three-fold over the past 10 years to US$ 46 billion in 2012. And trade with China, where I am writing this, has exploded from US$ 11 billion to US$ 166 billion over the same time.
With China now by far the biggest single...
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May 10, 2013
Can technology trigger sustainable growth?
It is fantastic to see capitalism helping to address some of the world’s most pressing social problems – talent from corporations is moving to not-for-profit companies to spearhead impressive social causes, and the evolving models of social entrepreneurship and corporate social responsibility are promising. There is a trend for for-profit businesses to focus their resources on social problems, especially since the disillusionment with financial capitalism across the globe has triggered a search for new models of sustainable economic growth.
However, to what extent have we been able to solve...
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April 13, 2013
Can reducing taxes on travel boost Growth?
Tom King, Head of Government and Industry Affairs at British Airways, makes a case for reducing taxes on travel and tourism
As economies across the globe continue to search for sustained growth, the promise of increased export income from inbound tourism has become ever more attractive. In the United Kingdom, the government has set out its ambition to treble the number of Chinese tourists it attracts to Britain – to 500,000 a year by 2015. Growth in tourism forms an important part of the economic strategies of many leading economies and is an important engine for job creation.
Yet many of the...
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February 14, 2013
Meeting America’s growth challenge
Laura Tyson, a former chair of the US President’s Council of Economic Advisers, is a professor at the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley.
BERKELEY – The United States continues to recover from its deepest economic slump since the Great Depression, but the pace of recovery remains frustratingly slow. There are several reasons to anticipate modest improvement in 2013, although, as usual, there are downside risks.
Prolonged recession or a financial crisis in Europe and slower growth in emerging markets are the main external sources of potential danger. At...
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January 31, 2013
Target growth to avoid a lost decade
We cannot afford to let the global economy drift, warns Gordon Brown, former UK Prime Minister and Annual Meeting participant.
As world business leaders gather in Davos, a long-overdue paradigm shift in monetary policy – subordinating the targeting of inflation to the targeting of growth – is slowly taking shape.
In what some call a “reverse Volcker moment,” US Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke has specified a target of 6.5% unemployment alongside his inflation target; Japan’s new government has proposed a minimum inflation target; and Mark Carney, the next governor of the Bank of England...
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January 25, 2013
How can supply chains drive growth?
From Doha to Singapore – how can supply chain focus on trade help drive economic growth?
As part of the World Economic Forum’s Enabling Trade programme, a report published today reveals that reducing supply chain barriers could increase global GDP up to six times more than removing all import tariffs. The report, Enabling Trade: Valuing Growth Opportunities, culminates a year of research led by a team from the Forum, the World Bank and Bain & Company.
For the past three years, Singapore has ranked first on the Forum’s Enabling Trade Index, which measures the ease of cross-border...
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January 23, 2013
Growth and austerity: a complex policy mix
World Economic Forum’s meeting in Istanbul attracted over 800 business leaders, politicians and bankers to consider the prospects to the region’s success and transformation. Among the participants was Ukrainian President Viktor Yanukovych.The Middle East North African and Eurasia, which Ukraine borders, is one of the fastest growing regions in the world. However, the uncertainty over the performance of its near neighbour, the EU, currently throws a potentially dark shadow over the region’s economic outlook. The economic uncertainty at present lies around the future of the euro and the impact...
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June 7, 2012
Balancing the world through inclusive growth
Growth has undeniably been the economic goal for the last few decades. It is believed that growth does not only benefit the rich, but can also pull up those at the base of the pyramid and out poverty. But is this always the case?As many, if not all, government policies and performance indicators are focused on high GDP while ignoring issues that should be their real mandate – food security, the environment and access to healthcare, especially for the poor – I am not really convinced about the “magic of growth” in conventional terms.At the Mae Fah Luang Foundation, we believe that the...
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May 30, 2012
Finding growth opportunities in trade
Governments worldwide, but particularly in Europe, are looking for growth. Can trade provide it? And to enable it, can we apply austerity to trade barriers and stimulus to trade facilitation?There is a growing view that traditional trade objectives focused on market access are becoming outdated in a world in which value is added incrementally in numerous locations. Physical, administrative and informational obstructions to trade are a greater deterrent than tariff barriers.Business wants policy-makers to address key constraints that obstruct the movement of goods or increase supply chain...
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May 23, 2012
A Shared Agenda to Grow Africa
What do three heads of state, 10 ministers, 116 companies and a group of farmer leaders have in common?They all want to see growth in Africa’s agriculture sector.So do we – which is why we found ourselves at the Grow Africa Investment Forum in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, last Wednesday, in a room packed with nearly 300 people at the closing session. The atmosphere in the room was slightly electric, suspenseful.One by one, speakers rose to say they felt we were nearing a tipping point. “What an epic moment,” said Josette Sheeran, the new Vice-Chair of the World Economic Forum, whose previous...
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May 15, 2012
The road to Africa 2022
Africa in 10 years time. This was the thread of discussion on the final day of the World Economic Forum for Africa. World leaders and leaders of thought and innovation considered the question. Where can Africa be in 10 years time? How should it look?Opinions centred, inevitably, around education, economic prosperity and employment for the youth of the continent.But I have my own question. How will Africa look in 2022 if we do not enable the whole population to deploy its abundance of home-grown innovation? What will happen if women and men are not able to engage in the development of the...
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May 15, 2012
Africa’s Transformation is already well under way
As this meeting draws to a close, I have been privileged to hear, feel and interact with the grand ideas that are gestating around Africa’s Transformation. I have heard about the immense opportunities that lie before us in the agriculture sector, a sector bursting with the potential to “feed the world”, putting Africa back in her rightful and historic place as a breadbasket for the world, capable of feeding rather than being fed.I have experienced the extent to which the continent’s people are embracing, deploying and crafting technology, something I have more than a passing interest in as I...
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May 11, 2012
African potential – it’s time to “Grow Africa”
A quarter of a century ago, Africa was seen as a land of famine. And while much has improved, hunger crises continue to haunt the continent, emerging most recently in the Sahel region and East Africa. As global food prices have spiked repeatedly over the past five years, the resulting rise in hunger, poverty and political instability have reminded us how many African families live close to the edge of food insecurity.With agriculture providing 70% of employment and 30% of GDP in Africa, on average, Africa’s well-being is closely tied to its agriculture sector – for better or worse.Now,...
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May 8, 2012
Africa is a continent of opportunities
In January, I was at the World Economic Forum in Davos as a Global Shaper representing Ethiopia and the Addis Hub. This meant a very rare and unique opportunity to meet and share experiences with amazing young people from all corners of the world, with impeccable achievements ranging from leading corporations to leading revolutions. It also meant unlimited access to more than 2500 corporate, political and civil society leaders that were gathered in Davos.While in Davos, out of the hundreds of sessions, I attended four sessions on Africa. Surprisingly, the usual grim and gloomy...
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May 7, 2012
BRICS: The “S” for South Africa represents the rising “A” for Africa
After successfully hosting the 2010 FIFA Soccer World Cup, it was a case of double celebration when the country was invited to join Brazil, Russia, India and China to be a member of the BRICS. Of course, compared to these economic giants, South Africa’s economy, population and growth prospects are quite small.However, since the advent of democracy in 1994, South Africa has often punched above its weight in global terms. Furthermore, the inclusion of South Africa has certainly cemented the rising optimism about the prospects for African growth and a changing narrative for the continent. It is...
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March 28, 2012
Bringing growth to Brazilian shores
In a series of posts leading up to the World Economic Forum’s Energy for Economic Growth report launched on Wednesday 7th March 2012, José Sergio Gabrielli de Azevedo, President and Chief Executive Officer, Petrobras, Brazil, expresses his hopes for Brazilian economic growth through the development of pre-salt oil reserves.Since we discovered the pre-salt oil fields offshore Brazil in 2007, much has been said about the potential for the area to become one of the world’s major oil and gas provinces. Indeed, the IEA points out that the pre-salt fields could be a gamechanger for our company...
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March 5, 2012
Africa 3.0
When history is being made, the participants sometimes do not recognize it. When history is being made, it at times happens unknowingly and can be easily passed off as an ordinary affair initially. All in all, it is incumbent on the partakers of history to recognize the crystal moment that fate has brought upon them, to harness that moment and provide the opportunity for it to have a lifetime effect. These unique moments can change the course of our lives and shift the order of the world, as we know it. Some are lucky to recognize when the volcanic coals appear on their laps. Unfortunately,...
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February 20, 2012
From development to growth: finding value in time
What first comes to your mind when you hear or read the word “development”? I personally visualize women’s empowerment projects, vaccination campaigns, school feeding programmes, microfinance initiatives, and not to mention humanitarian assistance, disaster risk reduction, responsibility to protect, cluster approach … I could go on. What I mean is that when I think about development, my brain automatically associates it with aid.What’s the new context for development? This year at Davos, the answer – at least the one I made for myself digesting all those insights I collected – was clear: if...
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January 29, 2012
How can we value potential to create growth?
India is eagerly awaiting her demographic dividend – the 1.1 billion working age adults that will populate our nation by 2022. 700 million Indians are under the age of 35, a stark contrast to aging Western economies. In ten years time, India will be supplying a full quarter of the world’s workforce. The question of the hour: will these workers be educated, equipped with technical training and soft skills, or will they just get by, limping along in an informal economy or unable to scale their career ladders?Our current capacity can only train 25% of new workers needed, so the Indian government...
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January 26, 2012
World Economic Forum Annual Meeting 2011
Browse the ReportSession VideosHighlights from Saturday 29 JanuaryHighlights from Friday 28 JanuaryHighlights from Thursday 27 JanuaryHighlights from Wednesday 26 JanuaryQuotes from Meeting ParticipantsThe Annual Meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos-Klosters is perhaps best known to the world at large simply as "Davos". It is much more than a simple get-together of global leaders from many fields in a Swiss ski resort, however.The Annual Meeting provides a rethinking of our systems and exploration of strategies and solutions that have positive transformational implications. For...
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January 26, 2011
Stimulating economic growth
There is widespread agreement that the international community needs to undertake a complementary set of adjustments in national policies supported by improvements in international cooperation to rebalance the world economy and make it more inclusive and sustainable. There are numerous key points to bear in mind.Viewed over a half-century, the global economy is in better shape than the crisis might indicate. Mankind is better off than it has ever been and technology promises to make things even better. Whatever choices are made to improve global governance, care must be taken not to...
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November 3, 2010
