Publication: From Barriers to Bridges: Procompetitive Reforms for Productivity and Jobs in Kenya
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2025-11-24
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2025-11-25
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Kenya has made important progress in its economic transformation agenda in the past decade, but significant legal and regulatory hurdles continue to impede competition across multiple sectors. Overcoming these barriers is essential because competition is key to increasing the number of jobs to match Kenya’s growing workforce and improving productivity to enable higher pay. Overall, there is significant room to make Kenya’s regulatory framework less restrictive to competition. Kenya has the highest product market regulation (PMR) score among the available sample of high- and middle-income countries (2.92 compared to an average of 2.27 in middle-income countries and 0.88 for the top five performers), reflecting substantial barriers to market entry, distortions from public ownership, and limitations on trade and investment. The report presents a comprehensive set of reforms to dismantle barriers and foster a more competitive economy. Key cross-cutting recommendations include the following: reform state-owned enterprise (SOE) governance and operations; strengthen competition policy and enforcement; and reduce trade and investment barriers. The report also contains a wide range of sector-specific reforms in the agribusiness, electricity, information and communications technology (ICT), transport, and professional services sectors. Reforms in key input sectors can lift annual labor compensation growth by up to 2 percentage points, equivalent to over 400,000 jobs per year at the average wage in Kenya.
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“World Bank. 2025. From Barriers to Bridges: Procompetitive Reforms for Productivity and Jobs in Kenya. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/44019 License: CC BY-NC 3.0 IGO.”
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