Publication: Liberia : Inclusive Growth Diagnostics
Loading...
Date
2012-02-24
ISSN
Published
2012-02-24
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
Liberia aims to achieve middle-income status by 2030 through broad participation and inclusive growth. The Government's growth strategy aims to accelerate growth through the exploitation of natural resources, while maintaining sound macroeconomic policies, improving the business environment, and prudently allocating aid and commodity-based financing resources to expand infrastructure and formal sector employment. However, Liberia's experience with rapid growth in the 1960s and 1970s, that benefit a small percentage of the population, followed by economic collapse, widespread poverty and social unrest, and civil war, has made policymakers acutely aware that the quality of the growth process is at least as important as the rate of growth. Now that peace has been established and growth is once again on an upward trend, with the reactivation of the iron ore and agriculture sectors, and prospects for oil, promising opportunities for significant growth in the medium to long term, the Government wants to ensure that Liberia's growth over the next two decades will be sustainable and equitable. A key objective of the growth strategy is to avoid the traps posed by dependence on primary resources while creating the basis for economic diversification and employment generation, and providing opportunities and training so that individuals across the country can partake in the growth process. This diagnostic aims to support that strategy by identifying the factors in Liberia's economy that act as binding constraints to inclusive growth.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“World Bank. 2012. Liberia : Inclusive Growth Diagnostics. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/12609 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Uganda - Moving Beyond Recovery, Investment and Behavior Change, For Growth, Volume 2, Overview(Washington, DC, 2007-09)In 2006 most of the people of Uganda, with the notable exception of those in the conflict-blighted Northern Region, enjoy a better quality of life and brighter opportunities in a stable and growing economy. Uganda's economy has bounced back beyond what could be regarded as recovery, with real incomes per person now exceeding the levels reached at Independence in 1962. The report structure is as follows: volume one synthesizes the conclusions from analysis in Volume two. In Chapter 1 of Volume two, emphasis is placed on understanding what drove past growth at macro and sector levels, and in particular, on how Uganda's firms and farms have evolved. Chapter 2 continues the retrospective of past growth in agriculture, the most important sector of the economy. The report provides a comprehensive review of growth trends in agriculture, using several data sources. The chapter provides fresh insights on recent trends in poverty and inequality. Chapter 3 presents growth diagnosis and it identifies short-term actions to remove emerging constraints to present and near-term future growth. Chapter 4 models alternative future growth paths and the impact o f alternative public investments on growth using a SAM-based CGE model. The analysis reveals there is little to be gained from 'robbing Peter to pay Paul' for example fixing infrastructure by reducing education financing. Chapters 6 and 7 return to the short-term priorities to remove binding constraints to growth, and put meat on the actions identified in Chapter 3 as being required in the financial sector (Chapter 6) and in infrastructure (Chapter 7). Finally, Chapter 8 ends by assessing the scope for an externally financed scale up of infrastructure.Publication Growth Identification and Facilitation : The Role of the State in the Dynamics of Structural Change(2010-05-01)Active economic policies by developing countries governments to promote growth and industrialization have generally been viewed with suspicion by economists, and for good reasons: past experiences show that such policies have too often failed to achieve their stated objectives. But the historical record also indicates that in all successful economies, the state has always played an important role in facilitating structural change and helping the private sector sustain it across time. This paper proposes a new approach to help policymakers in developing countries identify those industries that may hold latent comparative advantage. It also recommends ways of removing binding constraints to facilitate private firms entry into those industries. The paper introduces an important distinction between two types of government interventions. First are policies that facilitate structural change by overcoming information and coordination and externality issues, which are intrinsic to industrial upgrading and diversification. Such interventions aim to provide information, compensate for externalities, and coordinate improvements in the "hard" and "soft" infrastructure that are needed for the private sector to grow in sync with the dynamic change in the economy s comparative advantage. Second are those policies aimed at protecting some selected firms and industries that defy the comparative advantage determined by the existing endowment structure either in new sectors that are too advanced or in old sectors that have lost comparative advantage.Publication Development Economics and the International Development Association(2011-01-01)Prevailing economic ideas -- and fashions -- about development have influenced the International Development Association (IDA) since its creation in 1960. The creation of the organization itself is the result of two contemporaneous facts: an urgent need to channel development finance to least-developed countries and an increasing pressure on World Bank management to directly address the issue of poverty in developing countries. Changing views, over time, have been a rationale -- and, at times, a justification -- for emphasizing poverty and social sectors; for providing grants to particular groups of countries; and for strategic choices and sectoral priorities. IDA has been influential in development debates and been an advocate for specific views about development policy. This paper gives an overview of these views and documents how they have shaped the activities of the organization since its creation. After a brief review of development thinking and of the organization of research at the World Bank, the paper documents the shifts that have taken place in country allocations and in sector emphasis in IDA over the past 50 years and highlights the strategic themes that have guided its development agenda: toward increasing country selectivity; from projects to programs; from conditionality to country ownership of reforms; and from input-based to results-based performance.Publication Technology Trap and Poverty Trap in Sub-Saharan Africa(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2008-03)Since the industrial revolution, advances in science and technology have continuously accounted for most of the growth and wealth accumulation in leading industrialized economies. In recent years, the contribution of technological progress to growth and welfare improvement has increased even further, especially with the globalization process which has been characterized by exponential growth in exports of manufactured goods. This paper establishes the existence of a technology trap in Sub-Saharan Africa. It shows that the widening income and welfare gap between Sub-Saharan Africa and the rest of world is largely accounted for by the technology trap responsible for the poverty trap. This result is supported by empirical evidence which suggests that if countries in Sub-Saharan Africa were using the same level of technology enjoyed by industrialized countries income levels in Sub-Saharan Africa would be significantly higher. The result is robust, even after controlling for institutional, macroeconomic instability and volatility factors. Consistent with standard one-sector neoclassical growth models, this suggests that uniform convergence to a worldwide technology frontier may lead to income convergence in the spherical space. Overcoming the technology trap in Sub-Saharan Africa may therefore be essential to achieving the Millennium Development Goals and evolving toward global convergence in the process of economic development.Publication Inclusive Growth Analytics : Framework and Application(2009-03-01)This paper argues that inclusive growth analytics has a distinct character focusing on both the pace and pattern of growth. Traditionally, applied country-specific poverty and growth analyses have been done separately. This paper describes the conceptual elements for an analytical strategy aimed to integrate these two strands of analyses, and to identify and prioritize country-specific constraints to sustained and inclusive growth. The authors apply the framework to the case of Zambia. The analysis suggests that income growth in Zambia is constrained by poor access to domestic and international markets, inputs, extension services, and information. High indirect costs - mostly attributable to infrastructure service-related inputs in production including energy, transport, telecom, water, but also insurance, marketing, and professional services - undermine Zambia's competitiveness, limit job creation, and therefore serve as a major constraint to inclusive growth. Improving the quality and access to secondary and tertiary education is essential if the poor are to benefit from future growth of the non-farm economy. Weak governance and, in particular, poor government effectiveness are factors behind the market coordination failures and the identified government failures, and are as such major obstacles to inclusive growth in Zambia.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
Error: Could not load results for 'https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/server/api/item/relateditemlistconfigs/52da9d76-5ed1-5518-bd7f-3b88f1ec3e72_downloads/itemlist'.