Un Giro Económico para Bolivia: Oportunidades y Desafíos en Agricultura
El sector agropecuario de Bolivia ha crecido más rápidamente en las últimas dos décadas que en cualquier otro período desde 1960, pero ese crecimiento ha estado impulsado por la expansión de la superficie cultivada más que por mejoras en la productividad. El régimen de políticas públicas ha restringido las exportaciones y ha desaprovechado un gran potencial. Los rendimientos de cultivos clave continúan por debajo de los de otros países pares en la región, y la expansión sostenida de la superficie cultivada implica riesgos tanto de costos ambientales como de una menor inserción en mercados internacionales, ya que éstos penalizan más los productos vinculados a la deforestación. A través de análisis comparativo, casos de estudios sobre los principales cultivos de Bolivia, y lecciones sobre la diversificación agrícola del Perú, este análisis identifica un conjunto recurrente de restricciones. Entre ellas, las limitaciones al uso de semillas transgénicas, la debilidad de la investigación y desarrollo y de los servicios de extensión, las brechas fitosanitarias y logísticas, y la falta de riego con orientación comercial. Dado que estas restricciones interactúan de manera distinta según la diversa geografía agrícola de Bolivia, proponemos poner en marcha una Estrategia Nacional para el Potencial Agropecuario que permita a cada una de las distintas regiones agrícolas del país alcanzar su frontera productiva. La diversificación de las exportaciones surgiría como un resultado natural en la medida en que más regiones de Bolivia logren desarrollar su potencial, generando divisas adicionales que son necesarias para aliviar la crisis macroeconómica que actualmente atraviesa el país.
Bolivia’s Economic Pivot: Agricultural Potential and Challenges
Bolivia’s agricultural sector has grown faster over the past two decades than in any period since 1960, but this growth has been driven by the expansion of cultivated area rather than by improvements in productivity, while the prevailing policy regime has restricted exports and left significant potential unrealized. Yields for key crops continue to underperform regional peers, and continued expansion of the agricultural frontier risks both environmental costs and reduced access to international markets that increasingly penalize deforestation-linked products. Drawing on cross-country comparisons, case studies of Bolivia’s major crops, and lessons from Peruvian agricultural diversification, this analysis identifies a recurring set of production- and market-side constraints, including restrictions on transgenic seeds, weak R&D and extension services, phytosanitary and logistics gaps, and the lack of commercially-oriented irrigation. Because these constraints interact differently across Bolivia’s diverse agricultural geography, we propose launching a National Strategy for Agricultural Potential to enable each of Bolivia’s distinct agricultural regions to reach its productive frontier. Export diversification would emerge as a natural outcome as more of Bolivia’s regions realize their potential, generating the additional foreign exchange needed to ease the country’s ongoing macroeconomic crisis.
Un Giro Económico para Bolivia: Un Diagnóstico de Crecimiento del Sector Turístico
El turismo representa una oportunidad estratégica para que Bolivia genere divisas y promueva un crecimiento más inclusivo. Este informe busca dimensionar esa oportunidad, identificar sus restricciones más vinculantes y proponer soluciones a ellas. Utilizando un modelo de gravedad del turismo internacional, encontramos que Bolivia tiene una brecha de más de 370 millones de dólares frente a su potencial. Nuestro diagnóstico identifica dos restricciones principales. A nivel nacional, la escasa conectividad aérea internacional limita el acceso de Bolivia a mercados clave. Recomendamos un paquete de reformas para mejorar la competitividad del sector aeronáutico y ampliar el acceso aéreo. A nivel local, las fallas de coordinación y los problemas de gobernanza dificultan la consolidación de ecosistemas turísticos, particularmente evidenciado en el circuito del Salar de Uyuni. Proponemos una nueva arquitectura de gobernanza a nivel de destino para facilitar la coordinación, alinear incentivos y generar mayores beneficios para las comunidades locales.
Bolivia’s Economic Pivot: A Growth Diagnostics of the Tourism Sector
Tourism represents a strategic opportunity for Bolivia to generate foreign exchange and support more inclusive growth. This report aims to quantify the opportunity, identify binding constraints and propose solutions. Using a gravity model of international tourism, we find that Bolivia performs significantly below its potential with an unrealized gap of more than USD 370 million. Applying Growth Diagnostics heuristics, we identify two constraints and suggest policy responses. At the national level, weak international air connectivity limits Bolivia’s access from key source markets. Accordingly, the report recommends a package of reforms to improve aviation competitiveness and air access. At the local level, coordination failures and governance issues hinder the emergence of strong tourism ecosystems, particularly in the Salar de Uyuni circuit. We propose a new destination-level governance architecture to facilitate coordination, align incentives, and deliver stronger benefits for local communities.
The Cube: A Lawful, Incremental Framework for Using Public Procurement to Pull Innovation
Governments already spend large sums to promote innovation through grants, tax credits, loans, equity instruments, incubators, prizes, and advisory programs. Yet public procurement is vastly larger than conventional innovation-policy budgets. In OECD economies, procurement is roughly 13 percent of GDP, while direct support and tax relief for business R&D together are only a fraction of one percent of GDP. This asymmetry matters. Even a very small innovation-oriented tilt in procurement can represent a material increase in the effective scale of innovation policy.
Yet procurement systems are rarely used this way. Most public procurement organizations are designed to secure timely delivery, preserve integrity, ensure equal treatment of suppliers, and obtain value for money. They are not designed to explore technological uncertainty, nurture early markets, or orchestrate experimentation with new solutions. Procurement officers are typically judged on compliance, continuity of service, and avoidance of visible failure. Under those incentives, the safe equilibrium is predictable: detailed specifications, strong threshold requirements, large established suppliers, price-dominant competitions, and risk transfer to vendors wherever possible.
This report argues that governments do not need to choose between lawful procurement and innovation policy. They can make procurement more innovation-friendly without abandoning core procurement principles. The relevant question is not whether procurement law should be suspended in the name of innovation. The relevant question is how familiar and lawful procurement tools can be reframed so that public buyers learn about technological possibilities, reduce uncertainty, validate solutions, and scale what works.
This is the purpose of The Cube.
Mapping Economic Opportunities in Global Clean Energy Supply Chains
The energy transition offers countries that can manufacture clean energy technologies substantial opportunities for sustainable economic growth. This paper provides a framework for context-aware industrial policy by applying economic complexity theory to a newly constructed dataset of twelve key clean energy supply chains (CESCs). We find that CESCs are diverse but highly interdependent; they are also growing faster and are more concentrated than other industries. CESCs exhibit substantial entry, exit and competitive churn, and countries are more likely to enter CESC industries that are related to their existing productive capabilities. We also explore changing global competitiveness and country positioning in these industries, and draw out implications of these patterns for industrial policymakers.
Women at Work: A Systematic Diagnostic of Female Saudi Employment Gains in Saudi Arabia
Saudi Arabia has witnessed a paradox where high demand for labor did not translate into high labor force participation for Saudi women. Despite possessing higher educational attainment than men, Saudi women historically faced lower participation rates, higher unemployment, and concentration in lower-paying sectors. This paper examines the paradoxical surge in Saudi women’s employment during a period of economic weakness following the 2014 oil price shock and 2020 pandemic. The study documents unprecedented employment gains driven primarily by new labor market entrants, particularly women with high school education or less, who diversified beyond traditional education and health sectors into retail, construction, manufacturing, and food services. Through empirical analysis of policy reforms implemented between 2016-2022, the paper identifies three key drivers of Saudi women’s employment gains: the removal of legal and social barriers (including workspace requirements and driving restrictions), wage subsidies during COVID-19, and increases in the Nitaqat de facto minimum wage for Saudi workers. While these gains represent historic progress, the analysis reveals concerning trends, including a widening gender wage gap and questions regarding the sustainability of subsidy-dependent employment growth. The paper highlights the need to balance short-term policy interventions to increase women’s entry into the workforce with long-term diversification efforts that align women’s skills and wage expectations with market demands to ensure sustainable and equitable employment outcomes.
Global Imbalances in International Trade, Dynamics of Debt and Finance: Causes and Mitigation Measures
Global imbalances have been building up in the world economy for decades and have reached critical levels, giving rise to tariff confrontations, trade wars, and geopolitical tensions. This paper presents our systemic analysis of three global imbalances: international trade, debt dynamics, and finance. Based on our new systemic concept of global imbalances and analysis of a large body of historical and latest financial and economic data in various countries and the world economy, we have concluded that these three global imbalances are closely interconnected and mutually influence each other through different channels and nonlinear feedback mechanisms that we describe. These three global imbalances are interrelated symptoms of deep structural problems in the global economy that require corrective measures both at the level of individual countries, especially the US and China, and at the global coordinated efforts by key countries within the G7 and G20. We highlight the key structural problems in the global economy, suggest a modern interpretation of the Triffin dilemma through the prism of equilibrium levels of exchange rates, and suggest possible measures to mitigate the global imbalances.
Tackling Discrepancies in Trade Data: The Harvard Growth Lab International Trade Datasets
Bilateral trade data informs foreign and domestic policy decisions, serves as a growth indicator, determines tariffs, and is the basis for financial and investment decisions for corporations. Accurate trade data translates into better decision-making. However, the raw bilateral trade data reported by UN Comtrade suffer from two structural problems: reporting differences between country partners and countries reporting in different product classification systems, which require product-level harmonization to compare data across countries. In this paper, we address these challenges by combining a mirroring technique and a data-driven concordance method. Mirroring reconciles importer and exporter differences by imputing country reliability scores and applying a weighted country-pair average to calculate the estimated trade value. We harmonize product classifications across vintages by calculating conversion weights that reflect a product’s market share. The resulting publicly available datasets mitigate issues in raw trade statistics, reducing reporting inconsistencies while maintaining product-level granularity across six decades.
Raising the Bar: A Poverty Line for Global Inclusion
The first of the United Nations 2015 Sustainable Development Goals is: “End poverty in all its forms everywhere.” An implication of this broad goal is the existence of an array of poverty lines, which raises the question of an appropriate lower-bound and an upper-bound to global poverty lines. The ‘dollar-a-day’ poverty line (updated for inflation to P$2.15 in 2017 PPP) is widely accepted as a global lower-bound poverty line (GLBPL). However, while different countries, organizations, and authors use higher poverty lines, there is no consensus on a global upper bound poverty line (GUBPL). We estimate a GUBPL using two conceptually distinct approaches, both grounded in the tension between the focus axiom for poverty measures and standard economic social welfare measures. We set a candidate GUBPL either at: (i) the consumption consistent with the achievement of adequate material well-being or (ii) the consumption level where marginal utility is “near enough” zero. Using either approach, empirical results across an array of measures of well-being demonstrate that ad hoc poverty lines, including the World Bank’s highest reported poverty line of P$6.85, are far too low to be plausible candidates for a GUBPL. Using the two approaches across four distinct indicators of well-being, all of the empirical results suggest a GUBPL of at least P$21.5, ten times higher than the standard GLPBL of P$2.15. The use of both a lower bound and upper bound global poverty line balances the radically exclusive nature of the ‘dollar-a-day’ standard, which classifies people with very low levels of material well-being and hence very high marginal utility of income as “not poor” with an equally radically inclusive GUBPL which counts only those with globally high material achievement and low(ish) marginal utility of income as “not poor.”