Publication: World Development Report 2020: Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains
Loading...
Other Files
2,154 downloads
12,939 downloads
27,652 downloads
Date
2020
ISSN
Published
2020
Author(s)
Editor(s)
Abstract
Global value chains (GVCs) powered the surge of international trade after 1990 and now account for almost half of all trade. This shift enabled an unprecedented economic convergence: poor countries grew rapidly and began to catch up with richer countries. Since the 2008 global financial crisis, however, the growth of trade has been sluggish and the expansion of GVCs has stalled. Meanwhile, serious threats have emerged to the model of trade-led growth. New technologies could draw production closer to the consumer and reduce the demand for labor. And conflicts among large countries could lead to a retrenchment or a segmentation of GVCs. This book examines whether there is still a path to development through GVCs and trade. It concludes that technological change is, at this stage, more a boon than a curse. GVCs can continue to boost growth, create better jobs, and reduce poverty provided that developing countries implement deeper reforms to promote GVC participation; industrial countries pursue open, predictable policies; and all countries revive multilateral cooperation.
Link to Data Set
Citation
“World Bank. 2020. World Development Report 2020: Trading for Development in the Age of Global Value Chains. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/32437 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.”
Associated URLs
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Publication World Development Report 2024(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2024-08-01)Middle-income countries are in a race against time. Many of them have done well since the 1990s to escape low-income levels and eradicate extreme poverty, leading to the perception that the last three decades have been great for development. But the ambition of the more than 100 economies with incomes per capita between US$1,100 and US$14,000 is to reach high-income status within the next generation. When assessed against this goal, their record is discouraging. Since the 1970s, income per capita in the median middle-income country has stagnated at less than a tenth of the US level. With aging populations, growing protectionism, and escalating pressures to speed up the energy transition, today’s middle-income economies face ever more daunting odds. To become advanced economies despite the growing headwinds, they will have to make miracles. Drawing on the development experience and advances in economic analysis since the 1950s, World Development Report 2024 identifies pathways for developing economies to avoid the “middle-income trap.” It points to the need for not one but two transitions for those at the middle-income level: the first from investment to infusion and the second from infusion to innovation. Governments in lower-middle-income countries must drop the habit of repeating the same investment-driven strategies and work instead to infuse modern technologies and successful business processes from around the world into their economies. This requires reshaping large swaths of those economies into globally competitive suppliers of goods and services. Upper-middle-income countries that have mastered infusion can accelerate the shift to innovation—not just borrowing ideas from the global frontiers of technology but also beginning to push the frontiers outward. This requires restructuring enterprise, work, and energy use once again, with an even greater emphasis on economic freedom, social mobility, and political contestability. Neither transition is automatic. The handful of economies that made speedy transitions from middle- to high-income status have encouraged enterprise by disciplining powerful incumbents, developed talent by rewarding merit, and capitalized on crises to alter policies and institutions that no longer suit the purposes they were once designed to serve. Today’s middle-income countries will have to do the same.Publication World Development Report 2023: Migrants, Refugees, and Societies(Washington, DC : World Bank, 2023-04-25)Migration is a development challenge. About 184 million people—2.3 percent of the world’s population—live outside of their country of nationality. Almost half of them are in low- and middle-income countries. But what lies ahead? As the world struggles to cope with global economic imbalances, diverging demographic trends, and climate change, migration will become a necessity in the decades to come for countries at all levels of income. If managed well, migration can be a force for prosperity and can help achieve the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. World Development Report 2023 proposes an innovative approach to maximize the development impacts of cross-border movements on both destination and origin countries and on migrants and refugees themselves. The framework it offers, drawn from labor economics and international law, rests on a “Match and Motive Matrix” that focuses on two factors: how closely migrants’ skills and attributes match the needs of destination countries and what motives underlie their movements. This approach enables policy makers to distinguish between different types of movements and to design migration policies for each. International cooperation will be critical to the effective management of migration.Publication World Development Report 2022(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2022-02-15)World Development Report 2022: Finance for an Equitable Recovery examines the central role of finance in the economic recovery from COVID-19. Based on an in-depth look at the consequences of the crisis most likely to affect low- and middle-income economies, it advocates a set of policies and measures to mitigate the interconnected economic risks stemming from the pandemic—risks that may become more acute as stimulus measures are withdrawn at both the domestic and global levels. Those policies include the efficient and transparent management of nonperforming loans to mitigate threats to financial stability, insolvency reforms to allow for the orderly reduction of unsustainable debts, innovations in risk management and lending models to ensure continued access to credit for households and businesses, and improvements in sovereign debt management to preserve the ability of governments to support an equitable recovery.Publication World Development Report 2021(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2021-03-24)Today’s unprecedented growth of data and their ubiquity in our lives are signs that the data revolution is transforming the world. And yet much of the value of data remains untapped. Data collected for one purpose have the potential to generate economic and social value in applications far beyond those originally anticipated. But many barriers stand in the way, ranging from misaligned incentives and incompatible data systems to a fundamental lack of trust. World Development Report 2021: Data for Better Lives explores the tremendous potential of the changing data landscape to improve the lives of poor people, while also acknowledging its potential to open back doors that can harm individuals, businesses, and societies. To address this tension between the helpful and harmful potential of data, this Report calls for a new social contract that enables the use and reuse of data to create economic and social value, ensures equitable access to that value, and fosters trust that data will not be misused in harmful ways. This Report begins by assessing how better use and reuse of data can enhance the design of public policies, programs, and service delivery, as well as improve market efficiency and job creation through private sector growth. Because better data governance is key to realizing this value, the Report then looks at how infrastructure policy, data regulation, economic policies, and institutional capabilities enable the sharing of data for their economic and social benefits, while safeguarding against harmful outcomes. The Report concludes by pulling together the pieces and offering an aspirational vision of an integrated national data system that would deliver on the promise of producing high-quality data and making them accessible in a way that promotes their safe use and reuse. By examining these opportunities and challenges, the Report shows how data can benefit the lives of all people, but particularly poor people in low- and middle-income countries.Publication World Development Report 2018(Washington, DC: World Bank, 2018)Every year, the World Bank's World Development Report takes on a topic of central importance to global development. The 2018 Report, Learning to Realize Education's Promise, is the first ever devoted entirely to education. Now is an excellent time for it: education has long been critical for human welfare, but is even more so in a time of rapid economic change. The Report explores four main themes. First, education's promise: Education is a powerful instrument for eradicating poverty and promoting shared prosperity, but fulfilling its potential requires better policies - both within and outside the education system. Second, the learning crisis: Despite gains in education access, recent learning assessments show that many young people around the world, especially from poor families, are leaving school unequipped with even the most foundational skills they need for life. At the same time, internationally comparable learning assessments show that skills in many middle-income countries lag far behind what those countries aspire to. Third, promising interventions to improve learning: Research from areas such as brain science, pedagogical innovations, or school management have identified interventions that promote learning by ensuring that learners are prepared, that teachers are skilled as well as motivated, and that other inputs support the teacher-learner relationship. Fourth, learning at scale: Achieving learning throughout an education system will require more than just scaling up effective interventions. Change requires overcoming technical and political barriers by deploying salient metrics for mobilizing actors and tracking progress, building coalitions for learning, and being adaptive when implementing programs.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Can Service Be a Growth Escalator in Low Income Countries?(World Bank Group, Washington, DC, 2014-07)Several high-level reports have raised the concern that low-income countries, especially in Africa, are experiencing premature de-industrialization. The concern is that they are growing without transforming. Have the latecomers to development missed the boat? Although these concerns are well placed, Africa's growth seems to be benefitting from a structural transformation of a different kind. The manufacturing sector as a share of gross domestic product has shrunk, but countries have benefitted from the third industrial revolution with globalization of services being at the forefront of this technological revolution. As services produced and traded across the world expand with globalization, the possibilities for low-income countries to develop based on their comparative advantage expand. That comparative advantage can just as easily be in services as in manufacturing. Comparative advantage need not be a one-trick pony.Publication Developments and Needs for Sustainable Agro-Logistics in Developing Countries(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2014-01)The Multi-Donor Trust Fund for Sustainable Logistics (MDTF-SL) aims at promoting innovative assistance projects that can break new grounds, test new ideas, and generate new knowledge for sustainable logistics that can be replicated in other countries and project. In November 2013 we were asked to write a position paper that analyses the state of affairs in Agro-Logistics. It aims to: (1) review and suggest a conceptual grounding for the MDTF-SL's activities; (2) outline the specific challenges developing countries face on Agro-Logistics; and (3) review existing attempts or interventions to meet the identified challenges. This position note starts with a definition for agro-logistics to have a mutual understanding of the concept. Section two presents emerging global trends and developments, which are then, translated to key logistics objectives in section three. Next, in section four, five international cases are presented that illustrate the needs and key bottlenecks in agro-logistics for developing countries. Section five presents an overview of potential interventions to improve logistics performances, resulting in recommendations (section six).Publication Albania - Building Competitiveness : Main Report - Overview of Findings and Recommendations(World Bank, 2009-10-01)Commitment to structural reforms and to economic stabilization has enabled high rates of gross domestic product (GDP) growth in Albania since the start of transition, and consequent reductions in poverty. The crisis caused by the collapse of 'pyramid' investment schemes in late 1996 and early 1997, the Government began to implement a stabilization and reform program which has resulted in rates of economic growth averaging more than five percent annually between 1998 and 2007. Strong growth has in turn made possible a 6.8 percentage point decline in the poverty headcount, a higher drop than in most countries in the (Eastern) Europe and Central Asia (ECA) region. These achievements have been underpinned by prudent fiscal and monetary policies. Budget deficits have been kept under control, declining from an average of around 10 percent of GDP in the late 1990s to less than 4 percent since 2005. In parallel, a monetary targeting regime has ensured price stability, with inflation remaining at around 3 percent in recent years. This report discusses how Albania can improve its long term competitiveness and growth by facilitating firms' ability to employ technology and skills and by closing the gap between formal regulations and actual enforcement. The second chapter sets the stage by presenting the macroeconomic setting, as well as key structural features of the Albanian economy. The third chapter provides an overview of investment climate constraints on firm performance. The crucial pillars of the investment climate that affect firm performance that is to say: (i) access to and adoption of knowledge by Albanian firms, and (ii) the gap between formal and informal regulation are treated in chapters four and five respectively. Chapter six concludes and summarizes policy recommendations.Publication How Do Special Economic Zones and Industrial Clusters Drive China’s Rapid Development?(2011-03-01)In the past 30 years, China has achieved phenomenal economic growth, an unprecedented development "miracle" in human history. How did China achieve this rapid growth? What have been its key drivers? And, most important, what can be learned from China's success? Policy makers, business people, and scholars all over the world continue to debate these topics, but one thing is clear: the numerous special economic zones and industrial clusters that emerged after the country's reforms are without doubt two important engines of China's remarkable development. The special economic zones and industrial clusters have made crucial contributions to China's economic success. Foremost, the special economic zones (especially the first several) successfully tested the market economy and new institutions and became role models for the rest of the country to follow. Together with the numerous industrial clusters, the special economic zones have contributed significantly to gross domestic product, employment, exports, and attraction of foreign investment. The special economic zones have also played important roles in bringing new technologies to China and in adopting modern management practices. This study briefly summarizes the development experiences of China's special economic zones and industrial clusters (their formation, success factors, challenges, and possible areas or measures for policy intervention), based on case studies, interviews, field visits, and extensive reviews of the existing literature in an attempt to benefit other developing countries as well as the broader development community.Publication Clean Energy for Development Investment Framework : Progress Report on the World Bank Group Action Plan(Washington, DC, 2007-08)During the 2007 spring meetings, the development committee endorsed the World Bank Group's action plan on the Clean Energy Investment Framework (CEIF). This progress report is a response to the committee's request for an update on the implementation of the action plan for the annual meetings in October 2007. It summarizes accomplishments in the three areas of the action plan: 1) energy for growth, with a particular emphasis on access to energy in Sub-Saharan Africa; 2) transition to a low-carbon development trajectory; and 3) adaptation to the impacts of climate change. This report also outlines an approach to scaling up actions on climate change and provides a review of options to further reduce the financial barriers to support low-carbon and adaptive growth in developing countries. This Progress Report provides an update on the implementation of the CEIF action plan.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
No results found.