Childcare Supply in Wyoming

This white paper summarizes Growth Lab research on the childcare market in Wyoming, where supply of childcare slots systematically falls short of demand. This nationwide problem is prevalent across Wyoming, including in both its larger population centers and smaller communities. The low population of many Wyoming communities adds to the challenge. Research that is summarized in the white paper identify differential constraints affecting childcare centers and home-based childcare facilities. Centers make up most childcare slots in the state and are plagued by a staffing challenge derived from low business margins and low wages that centers can afford under “reasonable” fee structures for the market, which cause many to operate below capacity despite widespread wait lists and demand. Home-based providers, which are particularly important for lower-population settings in Wyoming that cannot support larger centers, face operational challenges typical of very small businesses and new providers face a few solvable start-up hurdles. 

Through collaboration with an interagency working group in Wyoming, this white paper identifies a set of targeted initiatives for enabling business entry and childcare slots through both centers and home-based facilities. The focus of these initiatives is on expanding supply as opposed to subsidizing demand through subsidies to parents and families. Though an expansion of funding in this form would be useful, and the state government dramatically underspends on early childhood education in comparison to its longstanding focus on high K-12 spending, the focus is on low-cost and impactful ways to enable the market to better expand supply to meet high expressed demand. 

The following diagram summarizes the diagnosis and key strategies. Over the second half of 2024, the interagency working group and partners across Wyoming have focused on implementing a subset of these action points.

Related: Pathways to Prosperity in Wyoming project

Sri Lanka Growth Diagnostic

Throughout 2016, CID conducted a growth diagnostic analysis for Sri Lanka in collaboration with the Government of Sri Lanka, led by the Prime Minister’s Policy Development Office (PDO), and the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC). This presentation report aggregates collaborative quantitative and qualitative analysis undertaken by the research team. This analysis was originally provided to the Government of Sri Lanka in April 2017 in order to make available a record of the detailed technical work and CID’s interpretations of the evidence. A written executive summary is provided here as a complement to the detailed presentation report. Both the report and the executive summary are structured as follows. First, the analysis identifies Sri Lanka’s growth problem. It then presents evidence from diagnostic tests to identify what constraints are most responsible for this problem. Finally, it provides a summary of what constraints CID interprets as most binding and suggests a “growth syndrome” that underlies the set of binding constraints. 

In brief, this growth diagnostic analysis shows that economic growth in Sri Lanka is constrained by the weak growth of exports, particularly from new sectors. Compared to other countries in the region, Sri Lanka has seen virtually no diversification of exports over the last 25 years, especially in manufactured goods linked through FDI-driven, global value chains. We found several key causes behind this lack of diversified exports and FDI: Sri Lanka’s ineffective land-use governance, underdeveloped industrial and transportation infrastructure, and a very high level of policy uncertainty, particularly in tax and trade policy. We believe that these issues trace back to an underlying problem of severe fragmentation in governance, with a critical lack of coordination between ministries and agencies with overlapping responsibilities and decision-making authority.

Targeting Sectors For Investment and Export Promotion in Sri Lanka

In August 2016, the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) and the Building State Capability program of CID convened five teams of civil servants, tasking them with solving issues related to investment and export promotion. One of these teams, the “Targeting Team,” took on the task of formulating and executing a plan to identify promising new economic activities for investment and export promotion in Sri Lanka. With the assistance of CID’s Growth Lab, the Targeting Team assembled and analyzed over 100 variables from 22 datasets, studying all tradable activities and 29 representative subsectors. Their analysis highlighted the potential of investment related to electronics, electrical equipment and machinery (including automotive products), as well as tourism. Ultimately, the team’s recommendations were incorporated in GoSL strategies for investment promotion, export development, and economic diplomacy; extensions of the research were also used to help plan new export processing zones and target potential anchor investors.

This report summarizes the methodology and findings of the Targeting Team, including scorecards for each of the sectors studied.

Recommendations for Trade Adjustment Assistance in Sri Lanka

Sri Lanka has an excessively complex tariff structure that distorts the structure of the economy in important ways. It is a priority for the Government of Sri Lanka (GoSL) to rationalize the system in order to facilitate a transition to greater economic diversification, stronger export growth, and the emergence of new, higher paying jobs. Sri Lanka’s New Trade Policy makes this tariff rationalization a priority. It also recognizes that tariff rationalization should go hand in hand with new trade adjustment assistance measures to support the adjustment of firms and of people. The New Trade Policy outlines the basic contours of tariff rationalization and trade adjustment assistance measures but does not provide a detailed roadmap.

This discussion paper was prepared at the invitation of the Ministry of Development Strategies and International Trade (MoDSIT) as part of the Center for International Development’s research project on sustainable and inclusive economic growth in Sri Lanka. The aim of the paper is to study policy tools that the GoSL could use to structure trade adjustment assistance in the context of tariff rationalization. In order to accomplish this aim, we begin by outlining the type of tariff rationalization that needs to take place in order to address key constraints to growth in a way that is sensitive to both government revenue needs and political economy considerations. We stress that tariff rationalization must be approached in a holistic way that treats the various tariffs and para-tariffs as interrelated, rather than an approach that attempts to address one part of the system at a time. A holistic approach would provide many degrees of freedom to solve the underlying problems in the system while increasing revenues and potentially generating strong public support. Critically, a holistic approach would allow for a single tariff rationalization plan to be phased in over a period of years in a predictable way, whereas attempts to rationalize the system one part at a time would lead to extreme uncertainty.

With the principles of smart tariff rationalization in place, we draw upon international lessons and Sri Lanka’s own institutional capabilities to recommend a two-tiered approach to helping industries and workers adjust. In each case, the first tier represents low-cost measures that can begin in the short term to help industries and workers, regardless of whether they will be negatively impacted by tariff rationalization, while the second tier of assistance applies only to trade-affected industries and workers and can be developed in the medium term. For industries, Tier 1 support involves the use of an innovative process of public-private problem solving of industry-specific constraints, and Tier 2 support involves the use of special safeguard measures to provide an objective and transparent process for determining which industries require longer phase out periods for tariff reductions versus the tariff rationalization plan. For workers, Tier 1 support involves improved access labor market information and training opportunities through the development of regional (or local) job centers. Tier 2 support provides government funding for training and job placement services. We conclude that this package of trade adjustment assistance measures could be used to complement a holistic tariff rationalization plan. But we caution that attempts to rush the implementation of these measures without careful design and communication could deeply undermine the potential for the reforms to work in solving underlying economic problems.

Pathways for Productive Diversification in Ethiopia

Ethiopia will need to increase the diversity of its export basket to guarantee a sustainable growth path. Ethiopia has shown stellar growth performance throughout the last two decades, but, in this period, export growth has been insufficient to finance the country’s balance of payments needs. As argued in our Growth Diagnostic report,1 Ethiopia’s growth decelerated as a result of the increasing external imbalances which have resulted in a foreign exchange constraint. This macroeconomic imbalance is now slowing the rate of economic growth, job creation and poverty alleviation across the country. Although export growth will not be rapid enough to address the foreign exchange constraint on its own in the short-term, the only way for the country to achieve macroeconomic balance as it grows in the longer term is to increase its exports per capita. With only limited opportunities to expand its exports on the intensive margin, the Government of Ethiopia (GoE) will have to strategically support the diversification of its economy to expand its exports base.

This report applies the theory of Economic Complexity in order to describe the base of productive knowhow and assess the opportunities and constraints to diversification in Ethiopia’s economy. The theory of Economic Complexity offers tools to capture and quantitatively estimate the diversity and sophistication of productive knowhow in an economy and to analyze the potential to develop comparative advantage in new industries. These tools provide valuable inputs for informing diversification strategies and the use of state resources by providing rigorous information on the risks and potential returns of government industrial policies in support of different sectors.

Toward a Strategy for Economic Growth in Uruguay

The Uruguayan economy is recovering from the 2002 financial crisis that disrupted its banking system, caused a collapse of its currency and seriously affected its fiscal solvency. The crisis was clearly associated with the collapse of the Argentine economy and its concomitant currency, banking and debt crises. Both were also related to the sudden stop that followed the Russian crisis of 1998, which prompted an important realignment of the real in January 1999, a fact that had exerted enormous pressure on bilateral exchange rates within Mercosur. In this post-crisis period, Uruguay now faces several challenges to attain a sustainable growth path. This report proposes a series of recommendations towards this end. Implementing a strategy to accelerate growth inevitably involves interventions at both the macro and the micro level. The macro level involves the maintenance of a stable and competitive real exchange rate, so as to create a stable and encouraging environment for export growth. The authors take up each of these elements of the growth strategy. They first focus on the design of incentive policies for economic diversification and promotion. Then they discuss next the macroeconomic complements, with special emphasis on maintaining a competitive and stable real exchange rate.

The Dynamics of the Gender Gap: How do Countries rank in terms of making Marriage and Motherhood compatible with Work?

Research Note: “One Village One Product” Programs

The One Village, One Product (OVOP) movement started 40 years ago in a rural Japanese prefecture, with the aim of helping small villages and towns develop by focusing on their local culture and resources. Since then the principles of the OVOP movement have spread to other countries, including Thailand, Malawi, and beyond. The varying levels of success across these different versions of OVOP suggest some lessons on how to best organize rural development programs that could be useful as the Albanian government embarks on its flagship 100+ Villages project.

How Industry-Related Capabilities Affect Export Possibilities

The central question we will explore in this document is: Can we anticipate the opportunities that Colombian cities have to export specific products based on their existing productive capabilities?

In the following pages, we report a collection of results, analyses, and advances in which we assess how industry-related capabilities affect export possibilities. Our final goal will be to create a single measure that synthesizes all the knowledge and existing information about the productive capabilities of each city, both “horizontal” and “vertical”, and that quantifies how competitive a city can be if it aims at exporting a given product it does not yet export.

This document is broken in two main efforts: First, we want to understand the “mechanics” of diversification processes. And second, we want to be able to provide recommendations of products that are not produced in cities, but should be. The first effort requires a multitude of analyses, each trying to describe the characteristics of firms, of cities, and of the mechanisms that expand the export baskets of places. The second effort requires the development of a statistical model that is accurate when predicting the appearances of products in cities. These two efforts, explaining and predicting, are complementary, but different.

Explanations that lack the power of accurately predicting the future are useless in practice; predictions of phenomena for which we lack understanding are dangerous. But together they provide a unified story that can inform policy decisions.

Albania’s Credit Market

Credit market activity in Albania has been sluggish in recent years in spite of low and declining interest rates. The economy lost its growth momentum after 2009. Investment and lending activity slowed down substantially despite low interest rates, relative macroeconomic resilience, and available capacity in the private sector to take on more debt. This study analyzes the supply (lenders’) and demand (borrowers’) sides of the market.

The reason behind the credit market failure is a supply-demand mismatch. Poor financial intermediation is the main problem on the supply side. Despite excess liquidity in the financial sector, banks are excessively risk-averse, bank practices and products are unsophisticated, and non-bank financial market is underdeveloped. Excessive risk aversion translates into tight credit standards, credit rationing and credit crunch for some economic sectors, in particular those dominated by SMEs. On the demand side, firms overall have a low appetite to expand, limited capacity to create bankable and financially viable projects, and are also constrained by infrastructural gaps and economic uncertainty. The mismatch results from the fragmentation of the credit market, with reliable borrowers from traditional sectors having easy access to finance, and other segments being almost fully deprived of credit.

Government and donor-led policies to mitigate the problem have had little success. Albania enjoys access to a number of domestic and external funding schemes primarily focused on alleviating funding constraints for credit-deprived sectors, but these programs have been ineffective. Further study is needed to understand the reasons behind the limited success of these programs.

A National Development Bank (NDB) could address some of the observed credit market challenges. While an NDB’s ability to directly resolve demand-side constraints would be limited, an NDB could effectively tackle supply-side constraints in the credit market as well as provide surveillance and collect information from the private sector, leverage technical assistance, and develop tailored financial products. Establishing an NDB should be considered carefully, taking into account functional, governance, funding, staffing and other risk factors.