Economic Growth & Competitiveness
Advanced and emerging nations alike face major, albeit different, obstacles to stable, strong economic growth. Advanced economies strive for innovation, sustainable growth, and productivity improvement in the public sector. Developing economies must balance the benefits of economic progress across geographic regions, develop infra-structure and human capital.
Much progress has been made in recent decades in reducing the poverty of individuals and converging the well-being of societies. Continuing this progress will require a significant and sustained global focus on economic development and competitiveness. We work with institutions from the public, private and civil society sectors to design and implement strategies that trigger growth and help regions and productive sectors reach their maximum economic potential.
Our Expertise:
Competitive analysis & strategy. Through desk and field research, we determine a country or region’s competitive edge and performance gaps, and we pinpoint new sectors in which local conditions and capabilities are most conducive for development. We also help defining sector-specific growth strategies for resource-rich nations failing to meet their growth potential
Design of policy and regulatory frameworks. In a primarily interview and benchmark-driven approach, we understand the most problematic constraints on economic growth, and we recommend concrete changes that can produce more favorable policies and regulatory environments for our clients.
Special economic zones. We advise zone developers, regulators and operators around the world on strategic deployment of economic zones to support development objectives. Our offer includes the selection of strategic sectors for development and support in economic zones, the mechanisms best used to achieve the objectives of economic zones in the context of national development goals and support to investment promotion and regional regeneration strategies informed by global best practices. We combine evidence-driven analysis of worldwide zone performance with expert advice to support the design of economic zones tied to national development objectives including sustainable development, economic diversification and poverty alleviation.
Action and investment planning. We create action and investment plans that help clients raise capital, access new markets, and engage relevant authorities, companies, and policymakers to ensure business opportunities for growth attract the public and private attention, oversight, resources, and expertise they need to move forward. This includes improving the efficiency and efficacy of aid flows for international development agencies
Impact assessment. Our dynamic prosperity toolkit includes an assessment of national wealth accounts and allows us to model the impact of growth in a certain sector on these sources of wealth, including physical, human, natural, institutional and intellectual capital. Our Investment Impacts Model leverages national social accounting matrices to model the backward and forward linkages from investment in specific sectors, modelling the impacts of investment across supply chains and in trade flows, including in terms of growth, employment and public revenues. Our capabilities include cash flow modelling, allowing us to test the impact of financial, fiscal and non-financial support mechanisms on entrepreneurial incentives. These tools allow us to model growth in domestic sectors and imports, as well as the distributional impacts of growth across income levels and the resource intensity of any economic intervention, including water, energy and emissions impacts of specific investments.