The ‘New Structural Economics’

“I believe that every developing country, including those in Sub-Saharan Africa, can grow at 8 percent or more continuously for several decades, significantly reducing poverty and becoming middle- or even high-income countries in the span of one or two generations, if its government has the right policy framework to facilitate the private sector’s development along the line of its comparative advantages and tap into the late-comer advantages” – Justin Yifu Lin, Chief Economist, World Bank, in introducing his just published book New Structural Economics: A Framework for Rethinking Development and Policy

Leading Chinese economist Justin Yifu Lin, who ends his terms as chief economist of the World Bank at the end of May, has laid out an ambitious proposed framework which he argues goes beyond the old structural economics of the 1960s and 1970s with its overemphasis on state initiatives and the “Washington consensus” of market orientation in the 1980s and 1990s, building particularly on the experiences of successfully industrializing countries such as the East Asian tigers and other recently emerging powers such as China and Brazil. He labels it “New Structural Economics,” and, as the quote from the book’s introduction cited above makes clear, he is definitely optimistic about the prospects that Africa may follow the path of such rapid growth.

These views are hardly likely to mark any new consensus, as traditional macroeconomic assumptions remain embedded in many Bank policies, and critics both in and outside the Bank are likely to question whether the focus on growth, however modified, is not still likely to result in ignoring wider considerations of environmental impact, equity, and other components of human development that are not measured by gross domestic product. But there is no doubt that the prominent position of such views signals the growing intellectual weight as well as economic prominence of the emerging powers.

Source: go.worldbank.org

Source: 

via allAfrica.com: Africa: ‘New Structural Economics’.