Moving to the Adjacent Possible: Discovering Paths for Export Diversification in Rwanda

How can Rwanda, which currently has one of the lowest levels of income and exports per capita in the world, grow and diversify its economy in presence of significant constraints? We analyze Rwanda’s historical growth and trade performance and find that Rwanda’s high transportation costs and limited productive knowledge have held back greater export development and have resulted in excessive rural density. Three basic commodities – coffee, tea, and tin – made up more than 80 percent of the country’s exports through its history and still drive the bulk of export growth today. Given Rwanda’s high population density and associated land scarcity, these traditional exports cannot create enough jobs for its growing population, or sustainably drive future growth. Rwanda needs new, scalable activities in urban areas. In this report, we identify a strategy for greater diversification of exports in Rwanda that circumvents the key constraints and is separately tailored for regional and global export destinations. Our results identify more than 100 tradable products that lie at Rwanda’s knowledge frontier, are not intensive in Rwanda’s scarce resources, and economize on transportation costs. Our analysis produces a vision of a more diversified Rwanda, which can be used as a guide for investment promotion decisions. We illustrate an approach that can be applied to other settings in order to identify opportunities for export diversification that take seriously local constraints and external market opportunities.

What Small Countries Can Teach the World

The large economies have each, in sequence, offered “models” that once seemed attractive to others but that eventually gave way to disillusionment. Small countries may have some answers. They are often better able to experiment with innovative policies and institutions and some of the results are worthy of emulation. This article gives an array of examples. Some of them come from small advanced countries: New Zealand’s Inflation Targeting, Estonia’s flat tax, Switzerland’s debt brake, Ireland’s FDI policy, Canada’s banking structure, Sweden’s Nordic model, and the Netherlands’ labor market reforms. Some examples come from countries that were considered “developing” 40 years ago, but have since industrialized. Korea stands for education; among Singapore’s innovative polices were forced saving and traffic congestion pricing; Costa Rica and Mauritius outperformed their respective regions by, among other policies, foreswearing standing armies; and Mexico experimented successfully with the original Conditional Cash Transfers. A final set of examples come from countries that export mineral and agricultural commodities — historically vulnerable to the “resource curse” — but that have learned how to avoid the pitfalls: Chile’s structural budget rules, Mexico’s oil option hedging, and Botswana’s “Pula Fund.”

Capital and Labor Mobility and the Size of Sub-national Governments: Evidence from a Panel of Mexican States

We examine in this paper the relation between government size and capital and labor openness employing a panel of the 32 Mexican states over the period 1996-2006. Making use of two alternative measures of capital and labor openness and employing several alternative econometric specifications, we first find systematic positive effects of our openness measures on the size of the states’ total government spending. Thereafter, we break down total government expenditure and focus on three subcategories of spending associated with social welfare: education, health and poverty alleviation programs. We find that FDI flows, our proxy for capital openness, are not significant determinants of the state’s social spending, but labor openness, in the form of international migration, has a significant and even greater impact on some of the aforementioned categories than on total spending.

Long Term Impact of a Cash-Transfers Program on Labor Outcomes of the Rural Youth

This paper evaluates if, after ten years of implementation, the conditional cash transfer program Progresa/Oportunidades has had an effect on labor market outcomes among young beneficiaries in rural Mexico. We use a specific module for the young aged 14 to 24 in the 2007 wave of the Rural Households Evaluation Survey and apply a multi-treatment methodology for different time exposition to the program to identify effects on employment probability, wages, migration and intergenerational occupational mobility. Our results show very little evidence of program impacts on employment, wages or inter-generational occupational mobility among the cohort of beneficiaries under study. This suggests that, despite well documented effects on human capital accumulation of the beneficiaries, labor market prospects in the localities under the program remain sparse.

The State, Socialization, and Private Schooling: When Will Governments Support Alternative Producers?

Understanding the institutional features that can improve learning outcomes and reduce inequality is a top priority for international and development organizations around the world. Economists appear to have a good case for support to non-governmental alternatives as suppliers of schooling. However, unlike other policy domains, freer international trade or privatization, economists have been remarkably unsuccessful in promoting the adoption of this idea. We develop a simple general positive model of why governments typically produce schooling which introduces the key notion of the lack of verifiability of socialization and instruction of beliefs, which makes third party contracting for socialization problematic. We use the model to explain variations around the world in levels of private schooling. We also predict the circumstances in which efforts to promote the different alternatives to government production – like charter, voucher, and scholarship – are likely to be successful.

Structural Factors and the “War on Drugs” Effects on the Upsurge in Homicides in Mexico

Violence has increased all around Mexico in the last years, reflecting an uprise in the rate of homicides, and especially after some federal intervention took place to fight the drug cartels in some states. In this paper we use data at the municipal level to link social and institutional factors with the rates of homicides. We exploit the entrance for federal army interventions in 2007 and 2008 in some states to fight drug cartels. Using different estimation methods, we find that inequality, access to social security and income, as well as local provision of security and law are relevant in explaining homicides. We also find that the army interventions have increased not only drug related homicides, but also general homicides in municipalities under intervention compared with those with no intervention.

Looking like an Industry: Supporting Commercial Agriculture in Africa

It has long been known that countries only converge conditionally i.e. poor countries catch up with richer ones only if they adopt policies and institutions that are conducive to economic growth. Recently, Dani Rodrik (2011) has shown that manufacturing industries, unlike countries, converge unconditionally. We look at countries’ performance in agriculture and find that agricultural productivity actually shows unconditional divergence (and like GDP, conditional converge). This means that agriculture very much behaves like a country and not like industry. We find however that many crops do converge unconditionally, like industry. The question we then ask is: how can we make particular sectors in agriculture more like an “industry” and less like a “country?” The paper argues that the solution lies in finding business models that provide capital and access to missing markets in an aggregated fashion, thus forming high-productivity islands of quality. We provide examples and a discussion of promising business models that do that.

Promoting Millennium Development Ideals: The Risks of Defining Development Down

Debt Levels, Debt Composition, and Sovereign Spreads in Emerging and Advanced Economies

This paper studies the relationship between sovereign spreads and the interaction between debt composition and debt levels in advanced and emerging market countries. It finds that in emerging market countries there is a significant correlation between spreads and debt levels. This correlation, however, is not statistically significant in countries where most public debt is denominated in local currency. In advanced economies, the magnitude of the correlation between debt levels and spreads is about one fifth of the corresponding correlation for emerging market economies. In Eurozone countries, however, the correlation between spreads and debt ratios is similar to that of emerging market countries. The paper also shows that the financial crisis amplified the relationship between spreads and debt levels within the Eurozone but had no effect on the relationship between spreads and debt in standalone countries. Finally, the paper shows that the relationship between debt levels and spreads is amplified by the presence of large net foreign liabilities. This amplifying effect of net foreign liabilities is larger in the Eurozone than in standalone advanced economies. The paper concludes that debt composition matters and corroborates the original sin hypothesis that, rather than being a mere reflection of institutional weaknesses, the presence of foreign currency debt increases financial fragility and leads to suboptimal macroeconomic policies.

Who are the Democrats? Leading Opinions in the Wake of Egypt’s 2011 Popular Uprisings

I look at changes in public opinion in Egypt, using the two waves of 2000 and 2008 of the World Value Survey. I find that during this period, there has been a major increase in popular support for democracy, a sizable rise in concerns about inequality, and a fall in support for political Islam. I examine the extent to which these changes are connected, and how they clustered along class, age, and education lines. The main findings are that while in 2000, younger Egyptians were more progressive than their parents, by 2008, Egyptian society had become much more organized around class interests and showed little inter-generational differentiation. New democrats come from all backgrounds, but with a concentration among those on the left. Among social classes, the middle class emerges as the main champion for democracy, driven by both aspiration and grievances motives