HKS Center for International Development

Baja California se ha ubicado consistentemente entre los estados más prósperos de México, pero también entre los de crecimiento más volátil. De hecho, el desempeño económico reciente del estado estuvo marcado por una fuerte fase de desaceleración (como consecuencia de la crisis financiera en Estados Unidos), y una de recuperación, en la que si bien la entidad logró alcanzar sus niveles de crecimiento pre-crisis, solo ha podido hacerlo de manera parcial en términos de productividad, ingresos laborales, y empleo.

Esta trayectoria de colapso y recuperación parcial invita a una reflexión sobre los dilemas que enfrenta la entidad, particularmente en torno a sus fuentes de vulnerabilidad. Como se vio, una parte importante de la caída del producto durante el periodo de desaceleración viene explicada por la contracción de la demanda en los Estados Unidos. Sin embargo, factores más específicos al estado, tales como su integración multidimensional con California (incluyendo la del mercado inmobiliario), jugaron un papel amplificador de los efectos de la crisis. Adicionalmente, el hecho de que la entidad no haya sido capaz de mitigar los efectos de la transición tecnológica de su principal producto de exportación o de re-desplegar estos conocimientos productivos en actividades que permitieran recuperar plenamente los ingresos medianos, el empleo y la productividad laboral, puede ser indicio que existen características, propias de su naturaleza productiva, que abonan bien sea a aumentar la vulnerabilidad o a reducir la capacidad de recuperación.

En este estudio se consideraron los productos priorizados en el Reporte de Complejidad Económica de Baja California y se procedió a evaluar su potencial a partir de un conjunto de consideraciones de mercado. Luego, se agregó el potencial de cada producto en distintas colecciones de producto, y se seleccionó una industria cuya estimulación y desarrollo constituya una apuesta de desarrollo prometedora el estado. Respecto de éste se detallaron algunas estadísticas generales como una forma de evaluar su potencial de crecimiento e impacto para la economía local, estatal y nacional.

Para el objeto de este estudio, el sector industrial escogido para el análisis de cuellos de botella fue el de “Maquinaria industrial, herramientas y equipo” y puntualmente los productos: “Arboles de transmisión”, “Aparatos para soldar”, “Artículos de grifería para tuberías, calderas, etc.”, “Aparatos para regulación automáticos”, “Bombas para líquidos”, “Calderas para calefacción central” “Contadores de gas, líquido o electricidad”, “Densímetros, termómetros, etc.”, “Lavadoras de ropa”, “Los demás contadores”, “Máquinas de cosechar o trillas”, “Máquinas herramienta para trabajar madera”, “Máquinas para fabricar elementos impresores”, “Máquinas y aparatos para soldar”, “Máquinas y aparatos para trabajar caucho o plástico”, “Máquinas para el procesamiento de tela”, “Partes para máquinas para trabajar maderas o metales” y “Útiles intercambiables para herramientas de mano”. El desarrollo de esta colección de productos presenta oportunidades muy atractivas tanto a nivel nacional como internacional. Más aún, la producción de estos productos ha exhibido un importante dinamismo en el país durante los últimos años. Las exportaciones mexicanas de estos productos han aumentado en valor un 175% durante en el período 2004-2014. Asimismo, el empleo en las industrias asociadas al desarrollo de estos productos ha aumentado más de 35%.

En primer lugar, en este reporte se realizó una consolidación de los principales hallazgos de las investigaciones previas relativas al estado. En términos generales, se planteó que la entidad destaca por ser una de las más prospera del país, pero, al mismo tiempo, por haber exhibido un virtual estancamiento económico durante los últimos años. Esta situación se explicaría, en gran medida, por el efecto de la crisis financiera en Estados Unidos sobre su demanda por exportaciones, pero también por factores más específicos al estado, tales como el mayor impacto de la recesión estadounidense producto de la integración multidimensional de la entidad con California (incluyendo la inmobiliaria) y el shock tecnológico que afectara la producción de televisores, su producto de exportación más importante. Por otro lado, como principales restricciones a la diversificación productiva y el crecimiento económico en el futuro, se identificaron los problemas de inseguridad que vive el estado, así como su significativa dependencia de la actividad maquiladora. Este último elemento resulta relevante podría llevar a sobre-estimar las capacidades productivas existentes y hacer a la entidad más vulnerable a pequeños cambios regulatorios, tecnológicos o de demanda.

Posteriormente se presentó una descripción de las estrategias de desarrollo económico actuales encabezadas por autoridades a diversos niveles. Para ello, se realizó un mapeo de la oferta de programas públicos productivos y los actores que intervienen en su diseño y ejecución en base al Plan de Desarrollo Estatal 2014-2019, los Planes Municipales de Tijuana (2017-2019) y Mexicali (2017-2019) la Ley de Desarrollo Económico del Estado, la Agenda de Innovación, el Sistema Estatal de Indicadores, y la información cualitativa recogida durante visitas a la entidad. Esta revisión sistemática puso de relieve que el diseño de las estrategias de desarrollo económico ha contemplado, en su mayoría, proyectos con alcance vertical y un foco en la provisión de diferentes clases de insumos públicos. Esto resulta positivo toda que son precisamente este tipo de políticas las que presentan un mayor potencial para reducir los problemas de coordinación entre el sector público y privado y, por tanto, resultar en aumentos en la productividad. Sin perjuicio de lo anterior, es posible identificar obstáculos que inhiben una implementación eficiente de las estrategias. En particular, la falta de un proceso consultivo y guiado para la asignación de estímulos y la inexistencia de mecanismos para recolectar información sobre los factores que puedan desalentar la llegada de inversiones.

En el Diagnóstico de Crecimiento de Baja California se describieron las principales tendencias recientes del desempeño económico del estado. En esta subsección se resumen los principales hallazgos de dicho reporte, a modo de motivación para este estudio1. Baja California se ha ubicado consistentemente entre los estados más prósperos de México. Sin embargo, también destaca por presentar uno de los crecimientos más volátiles. La entidad fue la de menor crecimiento no-petrolero entre las 32 del país entre 2003-2010, sin embargo, desde entonces, ha crecido por encima de la media del país y a la par de otras entidades fronterizas. ¿Por qué la economía de Baja California ha presentado un desempeño más volátil? ¿Qué elementos propiciaron un ciclo de colapso y recuperación más acentuado que en otros lugares comparables? ¿Cuáles son las condiciones locales que amplifican la vulnerabilidad del estado y lo dejan más expuesto a crisis externas?

There is perhaps no larger sports policy decision than the decision to host or bid to host a mega-event like the FIFA World Cup or the Summer Olympics. Hosts and bidders usually justify their decisions by touting their potential impact. Many organizers and promoters either fund or widely disseminate ex-ante studies that tend to highlight the positive effects of the event. For instance, the consultancy firm Ernst & Young produced a 2010 report prior to the 2014 World Cup in Brazil that painted an optimistic picture of the event’s potential legacy. It estimated that an additional R$ 142.39 billion (4.91% of 2010 GDP) would flow through the Brazilian economy over the 2010-2014 period, generating 3.63 million jobs per year, R$ 63.48 billion (2.17% of 2010 GDP) of income for the population and additional tax collection of R$ 18.13 billion (0.62% of 2010 GDP) for the local, state and federal governments. Ernst & Young estimated that during the same period 2.98 million additional visitors would travel to Brazil, increasing the international tourist inflow up to 79%.

Such results, if true, would clearly attractive for governments considering a bid, but these expected impacts don’t always materialize. Moreover, hosting mega-events requires significant investments - and the cost of these investments is rising. Zimbalist notes emerging economies like China, Brazil, and South Africa have increasingly perceived "mega-events as a sort of coming-out party signaling that [they are] now a modernized economy, ready to make [their] presence felt in world trade and politics" (Zimbalist 2015). Their intentions may be noble, but the intention of using mega-events as a "coming-out party" means developing countries hoping to host them need to make massive investments. They are confronted by significant obstacles in that they lack sufficient stadiums, accommodations, transportation systems, and other sports-related infrastructure. As a result, each of the mega-events hosted by emerging economies has been exorbitantly expensive. The 2014 World Cup cost Brazil between USD 15 billion and USD 20 billion, while Beijing reportedly spent USD 40 billion prior to the 2008 Summer Olympic (Zimbalist 2015). Additionally, as the debt-ridden 1976 Summer Olympics in Montreal demonstrates, expensive mega-events are not limited to emerging economies alone. Flyvbjerg and Stewart have even shown that every Olympics since 1960 has gone over budget (Flyvbjerg and Stewart 2012).

Such incredible figures, in terms of both costs and benefits, beget the question: are mega-events worth it? Which type of reports should governments focus their attention on? What economic consequences should a government reasonably expect? With such high stakes, policymakers need to choose wisely. We attempt to answer these questions and aid the decisions of policymakers by providing a concise review of the rich academic literature on mega-events. For the purposes of this paper, we mainly focus on the Summer Olympic Games and the FIFA World Cup as mega-events. However, we also leverage information regarding events like the Winter Olympic Games, the UEFA football championships, and the Commonwealth Games. These events are organized on a smaller scale than the previous two, but they might provide some insights on how to best understand mega-events. We focus on claims surrounding the direct or indirect mechanisms that facilitate the impact that ex-ante studies predict. We provide a review of these claims and their validity according to the existing literature.

Section 1 focuses on the argument that mega-events lead to increased economic activity in the host economy. Specifically, we evaluate whether or not mega-events leads to access to previously inaccessible funds and increased investments. These investments could theoretically come from supranational organizations, private stakeholders, or public stakeholders. We also consider whether or not these new expenditures and investments have the multiplicative effect that many ex-ante studies assume they have. We finally investigate if the economic activity surrounding mega-events leads to increased revenues and tax collection for host governments. Overall, the existing academic literature suggests that any increased economic activity resulting from the event is routinely dwarfed by additional public budgetary commitments. Moreover, the arguments regarding multiplicative effects and increased revenues also tend to be exaggerated.

Section 2 shifts the focus to the potential impact of mega-events on a specific industry: tourism. We explore the effect of mega-events on the number of tourists visiting the host region and their spending habits. We explore this channel both for analyses specific to a single mega-event and for cross-country evaluations incorporating many events. Next, we consider the impact of a mega-event on a region’s brand and image in the international community with the idea of testing if hosting the competition will impact future tourism. Finally, we consider if mega-events lead to increases in the capacity of a city or country to welcome future tourists as a result of improved airport infrastructure, accommodations, and/or transportation systems. As was true in Section 1, the academic literature suggests that the claims of many ex-ante studies are misleading. Our review finds that there is some evidence for increases in tourist arrivals to certain events, but those increases are far smaller than what is generally predicted beforehand. These effects are also usually dependent on factors, such as the timing of the competition, that are specific to the host region and the event itself.

Section 3 briefly discusses other potential qualitative and social impacts of mega-events such as international business relations, crime reduction, and the "feel-good effect." In the penultimate section, Section 4, we discuss how these conclusions should impact the decision-making of policymakers. Finally, in a short conclusion, we summarize the findings of our review.

Campeche cuenta con el PIB per cápita más alto de todo México. Si bien buena parte de este desempeño se debe a la actividad petrolera (la cual representa 80% de la actividad económica del estado), incluso si se considera únicamente el PIB no petrolero per cápita el estado se ubicaba por encima del 80% de las entidades federativas del país. En 2016 el PIB per cápita de la entidad –a pesar de ser el más alto de todo México – era 45% de su valor en 2003, lo que equivale a una caída anual promedio de aproximadamente 6%. Si bien esta caída ha sido sostenida, las razones que la subyacen parecen haber variado en el tiempo.

En el período 2003-2009 se evidenció una divergencia entre el comportamiento de la actividad petrolera y la no petrolera. Por un lado, todos los sectores de la economía no petrolera, con la excepción de servicios de apoyo a los negocios, reflejaron tasas de crecimiento positivas. Por el contrario, la actividad petrolera cayó abruptamente, debido a que a pesar de que hubo aumentos en la cantidad de pozos de desarrollo perforados y en la cantidad de equipos de perforación activos, la producción petrolera cayó 26%, alcanzado con ello niveles que no se habían observado desde 1997.

En este estudio se consideraron los productos priorizados en el Reporte de Complejidad Económica de Campeche y se procedió a evaluar su potencial a partir de un conjunto de consideraciones de mercado. Luego, se agregó el potencial de cada producto en distintas colecciones de producto, y se seleccionó una industria cuya estimulación y desarrollo constituya una apuesta de desarrollo prometedora el estado. Respecto de éste se detallaron algunas estadísticas generales como una forma de evaluar su potencial de crecimiento e impacto para la economía local, estatal y nacional.

Para el objeto de este estudio, el sector industrial escogido para el análisis de cuellos de botella fue el de “Textiles” y, más puntualmente, los productos: “Abrigos para mujeres, de punto”, “Calzoncillos para hombres, de punto”, “Camisas para hombres, de punto”, “Camisas para mujeres”, “Camisas para mujeres, de punto” , “Las demás prendas de vestir, de punto”, “Suéteres (jerseys) y artículos similares, de punto”, “Sostenes y artículos similares”, “Trajes para hombres, de punto”, “Trajes para mujeres, de punto”, “Trajes y pantalones para hombres”, “Trajes y pantalones para mujeres” y “Trapos y cordajes textiles en desperdicios”. El desarrollo de esta colección de productos puede representar una oportunidad. Sin embargo, recientemente las exportaciones de estos productos por parte de México han venido perdiendo espacios en el mercado global, siendo el valor de las exportaciones mexicanas de estos productos en la actualidad menos de la mitad de lo que era en 2004.

En este documento se presentaron una serie de insumos para el desarrollo de políticas para Campeche, que apuntan a la estructuración de una estrategia de transformación productiva que le permita al estado revertir la tendencia adversa de los últimos años y promover una senda de crecimiento sostenido. Asimismo, este documento buscó consolidar los principales hallazgos de las investigaciones que hicieron parte del proyecto “Diseño de estrategias de transformación productiva para Campeche”.

Este estudio busca identificar las capacidades productivas de Campeche a partir de un análisis de la composición de sus exportaciones y su empleo basándose en la perspectiva de la complejidad económica. Asimismo, busca identificar productos potenciales que requieran una base de conocimientos productivos similar a la que ya tiene Campeche y que le permita mejorar su complejidad económica actual y prospectiva.

Para tales efectos, primero se explora la evolución en el tiempo del valor de las exportaciones de Campeche y la composición de las mismas, así como de los principales productos de exportación. En sentido, se tiene que las exportaciones de Campeche están determinadas por el sector petrolero. Los envíos de petróleo representan alrededor del 88,7% de las exportaciones estatales y explican en su totalidad la caída de éstas desde el 2008.

Since the end of the 1990s, Kazakhstan has relied on oil and gas as the main drivers of economic growth. While this has led to rapid development of the country, especially during years of high oil prices, it has also subjected the economy to more severe downturns during oil shocks, bouts of currency overvaluation, and procyclicality in growth and public spending.

Stronger economic diversification has the potential to drive a new era of sustainable growth by supporting new sources of value added and export revenue, creating new and better jobs, and making the economy more resistant to fluctuations in oil dynamics. However, repeated efforts to stimulate alternative, non-oil engines of growth have so far been inconclusive.

This report introduces a new framework to identify opportunities for economic diversification in Kazakhstan. This framework attempts to improve upon previous methods, notably by building country and region-specific challenges to the development of the non-oil economy directly into the framework to identify feasible and attractive opportunities. These challenges are presented in detail in the Growth Diagnostic of Kazakhstan and are summarized along three high-level constraints: (i) an uneven economic playing field dominated by government-related public and private-entities; (ii) difficulties in acquiring productive capabilities, agglomerating them locally, and accessing export markets; and (iii) ongoing macroeconomic factors lowering external competitiveness lower and making the economy less stable.

Our approach applies the economic complexity paradigm to identify what specific products and industries are most feasible for diversification, based on the existing productive capabilities demonstrated in the economy. We examine Kazakhstan's economic complexity at the national but also subnational levels, highlighting the heterogeneity of export baskets across regions that makes an analysis of opportunities at the subnational level essential.

After a large growth acceleration within the context of the commodity supercycle (2000-2015), Namibia has been grappling with three interrelated challenges: economic growth, fiscal sustainability, and inclusion. Accelerating technological progress and enhancing Namibia’s knowhow agglomeration is crucial to the process of fostering new engines of growth that will deliver progress across the three targets. Using net exports data at the four-digit level, we estimate the economic complexity of Namibia – a measure of knowhow agglomeration – vis-à-vis its peers. Our results suggest that Namibia’s economy is relatively less complex and attractive opportunities to diversify tend to be more distant. Based on economic complexity metrics, we define a place-specific path for productive diversification, identifying industries with high potential and providing inputs – related to their feasibility and attractiveness in Namibia – for further prioritization. Namibia’s path to structural transformation will likely be steeper than for most peers, calling for a more active policy stance geared towards progressive accumulation of productive capacities, well-targeted “long jumps”, and strengthening state capacity to sort out market failures associated with the process of self-discovery.

What does it take for a sub-national unit to become an autonomous engine of growth? This issue is particularly relevant to large cities, as they tend to display larger and more complex know-how agglomerations and may have access to a broader set of policy tools. To approximate an answer to this question, specific to the case of Buenos Aires, Harvard’s Growth Lab engaged in a research project from December 2018 to June 2019, collaborating with the Center for Evidence-based Evaluation of Policies (CEPE) of Universidad Torcuato di Tella, and the Development Unit of the Secretary of Finance of the City of Buenos Aires. Together, we have developed a research agenda that seeks to provide inputs for a policy plan aimed at decoupling Buenos Aires’s growth trajectory from the rest of Argentina’s.

Data on the sports economy is often difficult to interpret, far from transparent, or simply unavailable. Data fraught with weaknesses causes observers of the sports economy to account for the sector differently, rendering their analyses difficult to compare or causing them to simply disagree. Such disagreement means that claims regarding the economic spillovers of the industry can be easily manipulated or exaggerated. Thoroughly accounting for the industry is therefore an important initial step in assessing the economic importance of sports-related activities. For instance, what do policymakers mean when they discuss sports-related economic activities? What activities are considered part of the "sports economy?" What are the difficulties associated with accounting for these activities? Answering these basic questions allows governments to improve their policies.

The paper below assesses existing attempts to understand the sports economy and proposes a more nuanced way to consider the industry. Section 1 provides a brief overview of existing accounts of the sports economy. We first differentiate between three types of assessments: market research accounts conducted by consulting groups, academic accounts written by scholars, and structural accounts initiated primarily by national statistical agencies. We then discuss the European Union’s (EU) recent work to better account for and understand the sports economy. Section 2 describes the challenges constraining existing accounts of the sports economy. We describe two major constraints - measurement challenges and definition challenges - and highlight how the EU's work has attempted to address them. We conclude that, although the Vilnius Definition improves upon previous accounts, it still features areas for improvement.

Section 3 therefore proposes a paradigm shift with respect to how we understand the sports economy. Instead of primarily inquiring about the size of the sports economy, the approach recognizes the diversity of sports-related economic activities and of relevant dimensions of analysis. It therefore warns against attempts at aggregation before there are better data and more widely agreed upon definitions of the sports economy. It asks the following questions: How different are sports-related sectors? Are fitness facilities, for instance, comparable to professional sports clubs in terms of their production scheme and type of employment? Should they be understood together or treated separately? We briefly explore difference in sports-related industry classifications using data from the Netherlands, Mexico, and the United States. Finally, in a short conclusion, we discuss how these differences could be more fully explored in the future, especially if improvements are made with respect to data disaggregation and standardization.

Previous papers such as Russell, Barrios & Andrews (2016), Guerra (2016), and Russell, Tokman, Barrios & Andrews (2016) have aimed to provide an empirical view into the sports economy. This proves to be a difficult task, given the many definitions of ‘sports’ and data deficiencies and differences in the sports domain (between contexts and over time). The emerging view in these previous papers provides interesting information about the sports sector, however: it shows, for instance, that different contexts have differently intensive sports sectors, and that sports activities overlap with other parts of the economy. This kind of information is useful for policymakers in governments trying to promote sports activities and use sports to advance the cause of broad-based social and economic development.

This paper is written with these policymakers in mind. It intends to offer a guide such agents can use in constructing sports policies focused on achieving development goals (what we call development through sports[1]), and discusses ways in which these policymakers can employ empirical evidence to inform such policies.

The paper draws on the concept of ‘governance’ to structure its discussion. Taking a principal-agent approach to the topic, governance is used here to refer to the exercise of authority, by one set of agents, on behalf of another set of agents, to achieve specific objectives. Building on such a definition, the paper looks at the way governmental bodies engage in sports when acting to further the interests of citizens, most notably using political and executive authority to promote social and economic development. This focus on governance for development through sports (asking why and how governments use authority to promote sports for broader social and economic development objectives[2]) is different from governance of sports (which focuses on how governments and other bodies exercise authority to control and manage sports activities themselves), which others explore in detail but we will not discuss.[3]

The paper has five main sections. A first section defines what we mean by ‘governance’ in the context of this study. It describes an ends-means approach to the topic—where we emphasize understanding the goals of governance policy (or governance ends) and then thinking about the ways governments try to achieve such goals (the governance means). The discussion concludes by asking what the governance ends and means are in a development through sports agenda. The question is expanded to ask whether one can use empirical evidence to reflect on such ends and means. One sees this, for instance, in the use of 'governance indicators' and 'governance dashboards' in the international development domain. A second section details the research method we used to address these questions. This mixed method approach started by building case studies of sports policy interventions in various national and sub-national governments to obtain a perspective on what these policies tend to involve (across space and time). It then expanded into an analysis of sports policies in a broad set of national and sub-national governments to identify common development through sport ends and means. Finally, it involved experimentation with selected data sources to show how the ends and means might be presented in indicators and dashboards—to offer evidence-based windows into development through sports policy regimes.

Based on this research, sections three and four discuss the governance ends and means commonly pursued and employed by governments in this kind of policy process. The sections identify three common ends (or goals)—inclusion, economic growth, and health—and a host of common means—like the provision of sports facilities, organized activities, training support, financial incentives, and more—used in fostering a development through sports agenda. Data are used from local authorities in England to show the difficulties of building indicators reflecting such policy agendas, but also to illustrate the potential value of evidence-based dashboards of these policy regimes. It needs to be stated that this work is more descriptive than analytical, showing how data can be used to provide an evidence-based perspective on this domain rather than formally testing hypotheses about the relationship between specific policy means and ends. In this regard, the work is more indicative of potential applications rather than prescriptive. A conclusion summarizes the discussion and presents a model for a potential dashboard of governance in a development through sports policy agenda.

[1] This terminology comes from Houlihan and White, who identify the “tension between development through sport (with the emphasis on social objectives and sport as a tool for human development) and development of sport (where sport was valued for its own sake)” (Houlihan & White 2002, 4).

[2] The paper relates to a vibrant literature on this topic, which investigates the reasons and ways governments support the sports sector (classic and recent studies in this literature include Adams and Harris (2014), Gerretsenand Rosentraub (2015), Grix and Carmichael (2012), Grix (2015), Hallman and Petry (2013), Houlihan (2002, 2005, 2016), Houlihan and White (2002), Hylton (2013), Koski and Lämsä (2015), Schulenkorf and Adair (2013), and Vuori et al. (1995).

[3] Work on the governance of sports assesses the way international entities like FIFA and the IOC work with national and local governmental bodies to oversee, regulate, and otherwise manage sports like football and the Olympic movement, using authority to create and implement rules on behalf of those involved in the sport itself. See, for instance Forster (2006), Geeraert (2013), and Misener (2014).

This Growth Diagnostic Report was generated as part of a research engagement between the Growth Lab at Harvard University and the Astana International Financial Centre (AIFC) between June 2021 and December 2022. The purpose of the engagement was to formulate evidence-based policy options to address critical issues facing the economy of Kazakhstan through innovative frameworks such as growth diagnostics and economic complexity. This report is accompanied by the Economic Complexity Report that applies findings from this report on economy-wide challenges to growth and diversification in order to formulate attractive and feasible opportunities for diversification.

Kazakhstan faces multifaceted challenges to sustainable and inclusive growth: macroeconomic uncertainty, an uneven economic playing field, and difficulties in acquiring productive capabilities, agglomerating them locally, and accessing export markets. Underlying Kazakhstan’s transformational growth in the last two decades—during which real GDP per capita multiplied by 2.5x—are two periods that underscore how Kazakhstan’s growth trajectory has been correlated with oil and gas dynamics. The early and mid-2000s characterized by the global commodity supercycle led to an expansion of the economy upwards of 8% annually, with a mild slowdown during the global financial crisis. In 2014, Kazakhstan’s growth slowed with the collapse of commodity prices, and alternative engines of growth have not been strong enough to fend against volatility since. These trends, along with growing uncertainty in the long-run demand of oil and gas, continue to highlight the limitations of relying on natural resources to drive development.

As in the experience of other major oil producers, diversification of Kazakhstan’s non-oil economy is a critical pathway to drive a new era of sustainable and inclusive growth and mitigate the impacts of commodity price shocks on the country’s economy. Kazakhstan’s growth trajectory demonstrates that the country has enough oil to suffer symptoms of Dutch disease, but not enough to position it as a reliable engine of growth in the future. Development of non-oil activities has been a policy objective of the government of Kazakhstan for some time, but previous efforts for target sectors have failed to generate sufficient exports and investments to produce alternative engines of growth. This report characterizes the relationship between growth, industrial policy, and the constraints to diversification in Kazakhstan. It utilizes the growth diagnostics framework to understand why efforts to diversify into non-oil tradables has been challenging. The report proposes a growth syndrome to explain the constraints preventing Kazakhstan from achieving productive diversification and sustainable growth.

In the thirty years that have passed since independence, Namibia has been characterized by its over-reliance on its mineral resource wealth, procyclicality of macroeconomic policy, and large income disparities. After an initial decade marked by nation building and slow growth (1990-2000), the Namibian economy embarked on a rapid growth acceleration that lasted 15 years, within the context of the global commodity super cycle. Favorable terms of trade translated into an investment and export boom in the mining sector, which was amplified to the non-tradable sector of the economy through a significant public expenditure spree from 2008 onwards. Between 2000 and 2015 income and consumption per capita expanded at an average annual rate of 3.1%, poverty rates halved, and access to essential public goods expanded rapidly. As the commodity super cycle came to an end and the fiscal space was exhausted, Namibia experienced a significant reversal. Investment and exports plummeted, bringing GDP per capita to contract by 2.1% between 2015-2019. With debt-to-GDP ratios 3.5 times higher than those in 2008, the country embarked on a fiscal consolidation effort which brought the primary fiscal deficit from 6.8% of GDP in 2016 to 0.6% by March 2020. Along all these years, inequality has been endemic and is reflected across demographic characteristics and employment status. At present, a large majority of Namibians are unable to access well-paying formal sector jobs, as these tend to be particularly scarce outside of the public sector. Looking forward, the road to sustained inclusive growth and broad prosperity entails expanding the formal private labor market by diversifying the Namibian economy, while at the same time removing the barriers preventing Namibians from accessing these opportunities inherited from the apartheid.

The Growth Lab at Harvard University has partnered with the Government of Namibia to develop research that results in inputs for a policy strategy aimed at promoting sustainable and inclusive growth. The Growth Diagnostic is a cornerstone of the ongoing research engagement and is meant at providing an overview of the most binding constraints to Namibia’s economic performance and outlining how these relate in a systemic way to the concurrent challenges of growth, fiscal sustainability, and inclusion.

Inclusive growth in Namibia is currently facing a set of self-reinforcing constraints. The country is missing both the productive capabilities (words) and required skills (letters) to sustain longer periods of growth. The low degree of knowhow agglomeration that can be inferred from its current productive structure – as gathered by the Economic Complexity Index (ECI) – leaves very little opportunities of diversification that can be pursued by redeploying existing skills (low connectedness). Our analysis reveals that Namibia has been able to diversify differentially more that most of its peers given its current set of productive capabilities, but the problem is that the set of adjacent opportunities are neither complex nor plenty. As the marginal cost of acquiring new capabilities tend to be high, the government needs to take a more active role in sorting coordination and information failures associated to the process of productive diversification and self-discovery.

Relatedly, Namibia’s growth prospects of are also constrained by a shortage of specialized skills. Three empirical facts derived from econometric analysis of Labor Force Survey statistics point in this direction. First, certain skill-intensive industries and occupations exhibit differentially higher wage premiums. Second, highly educated, and experienced workers face the lowest unemployment rates in the economy, by a wide margin. Third, skill-intensive industries tend to grow less than the rest of the sectors in the economy.

The demand for high skilled foreign workers is high – as proxied by their wage premium. This skill shortage may be constraining not only existing industries but also the development of new engines of growth, limiting access to opportunity for Namibians across all skill levels. Missing skills at the top of the spectrum tends to depress job creation at the bottom. These two constraints – low knowhow agglomeration with poor connectedness and skills shortages – seem to reinforce each other. Using the Scrabble metaphor, Namibia is missing the letters (productive capabilities) and the entire words (more complex products).

Knowhow, by definition, resides in brains of people and it’s embedded in the goods and services a country produces. A broad knowhow-enhancing strategy aimed at targeting efficiency-seeking foreign direct investment (FDI, firms bringing entire new words to Namibia), and migration regulation policies (specific letters needed by more complex industries) is required to ease the binding constraints. Investment promotion efforts shall be targeted to ‘efficiency-seeking’ firms, which tend to take advantage of a competitive factor in the country (efficient labor force, access to international financial markets, infrastructure, etc.) to produce and export to foreign markets. This type of FDI is essentially different from the ‘natural resource-seeking’ investments that have characterized the Namibian economy and pose additional challenges. At the same time, the country would benefit from a more open immigration policy targeted towards high-skill workers. The evidence we have gathered suggests that high-skill foreigners tend to function as complements – rather than substitutes – to Namibian workers: industries with larger shares of high-skill workers tended to pay lower skill workers significantly higher wages. Easing the existing restrictions t labor flows and incentivizing inflows of high-skill foreigners will likely trickle down into the rest of the labor force and enhance the knowhow agglomeration of the Namibian productive ecosystem.

A challenge to productive diversification broadly, and attracting foreign investment and talent more particularly, might be policy uncertainty. Existing levels of policy uncertainty – instability or absence of the adequate regulating environment, worries about potential issues for property rights, inexperience with respect to the efficiency of domestic courts – in Namibia might not be enough to deter investments in resource-based industries, but might be an important hurdle for other type of industries, especially the ones that have a choice regarding their international location. To attract these investments, a simpler and more transparent investment environment, coped a more comprehensive set of international investment treaties, might be necessary.

The report is organized in six sections, including this Executive Summary. Section 2 outlines the Growth Diagnostic methodology. Section 3 provides a summary of the growth trajectory of Namibia and the challenges facing inclusive growth. Section 4 covers the main takeaways of the analysis conducted in each of the branches of the Growth Diagnostics Tree, including those related to access to finance, low social returns, government failures and agglomeration of collective knowhow. Section 5 concludes by highlighting potential binding and providing inputs for a collaborative exploration of why these issues have persisted and become an equilibrium.

The Government of Western Australia (WA), acting through its Department of Primary Industries and Regional Development (DPIRD), invited the Growth Lab of the Center for International Development at Harvard University to partner with the state to better understand and address constraints to economic diversification through a collaborative applied research project. The project seeks to apply growth diagnostic and economic complexity methodologies to inform policy design in order to accelerate productive transformation, economic diversification, and more inclusive and resilient job creation across Western Australia. As its name implies, this Growth Perspective Report aims to provide a set of perspectives on the process of economic growth in WA that provide insights for policymakers toward improving growth outcomes.

This Growth Perspective Report describes both the economic growth process of Western Australia — with a focus on the past two decades — and identifies several problematic issues with the way that growth has been structured. In particular, this report traces important ways in which policies applied during the boom and subsequent slowdown in growth over the last twenty years have exacerbated a number of self-reinforcing negative externalities of undiversified growth. The report analyzes three key channels through which negative externalities have manifested: labor market imbalances, pro-cyclicality of fiscal policy, and a misalignment of public goods. The report includes sections on each of these channels, which provide perspectives on the ways in which they have hampered the quality of growth and explore the reasons why problematic externalities have become self-reinforcing. In some cases, new issues have emerged in the most recent iteration of WA’s boom-slowdown cycle, but many issues have roots in the long-term growth history of WA.

In this report, we study Hermosillo’s economic performance and assess critical issues affecting the city’s ability to achieve stronger economic growth. Although Hermosillo is far from experiencing economic stagnation, it fell behind other cities that managed to become successful economic hubs between 2010 and 2020. The main reason behind this trailing growth is Hermosillo’s relatively low diversification and investment dynamics, especially in the manufacturing sector. We apply growth diagnostic testing on various potential constraints to economic growth: logistics, electricity, water, human capital, housing, and transportation. Although none of them have directly constrained economic growth in the past, some are explicit threats to increasing growth in the future, thus catching up with high-performing peers. Electricity, human capital, and logistics are comparative advantages, while water, housing, and transportation are threats.

In 2025, Mexico is expected to start a new period in its economic history marked by the promise of nearshoring and a new presidential administration. In the past, Mexico has gone through milestones that heavily impacted its economic development path, like the establishment of NAFTA and the China Shock (Hanson, 2010). The rise of Northern Mexico and other regions like El Bajío as global manufacturing hubs has resulted from greater integration with the North American market. This has brought foreign direct investments (FDI) targeted at establishing manufacturing sites primarily to cater to US demand and exports to the rest of the world. Mexico holds high expectations that nearshoring will bring opportunities of the same or greater magnitude. In that context, Hermosillo stands out as a city with the potential to exploit those opportunities and enhance its economic transformation. It is crucial to analyze its binding constraints for economic growth, comparative advantages, and potential concerns to understand how well-positioned Hermosillo is to take advantage of this momentum.

Following the introduction and a methodological overview, the report is divided into four main sections. Section 3 provides a growth perspective on Hermosillo; Section 4 presents an analysis of growth constraints; Section 5 explains the local diversification challenge in detail; and Section 6 describes strategic policy areas to accelerate growth that result from this growth diagnostic analysis.

As described in Russell, Barrios & Andrews (2016), past attempts to understand the sports economy have been constrained by a number of data limitations. For instance, many of these accounts use revenues when value added measures would be more appropriate. Similarly, many accounts use top-down definitions that result in double counting and an inflated estimate of the size of the sports economy. More importantly, past accounts have focused most of their efforts estimating the overarching size of the sports economy. Constrained by aggregated data that groups a wide range of sports-related economic activities together, they primarily discuss the size of the sports-related economic activity. Their focus on answering the question of "How big?" conceals substantial differences between activities. Core sports activities, such as professional sports teams, behave very differently than activities, like sporting goods manufacturing that are closer to the periphery of the sports economy. Likewise, there are even important differences amongst core sports activities. Professional sports teams are very different than fitness facilities, and they might differ in different respects.

Guerra (2016) demonstrates that, when detailed, disaggregated data are available, the possibilities to analyze and understand the sports are greatly increased. For instance, Guerra (2016) were able to conduct skills-based analyses, magnitude analyses, employment characterizations, geographic distribution analyses, and calculations of the intensity of sports activities. The sector disaggregation, spatial disaggregation, and database complementarity present in the Mexico data used in that paper therefore enables a more detailed and nuanced understanding of sports and sports-related economic activity.

Data with characteristics similar to those found in Mexico are few and far between. We have, unfortunately, been unable to completely escape such data limitations. However, we have compiled and analyzed a large array of employment data on sports-related economic activities in Europe. In the paper that follows, we describe our analyses of these data and the findings produced.

Section 1 begins with a discussion of employment in sports and an explanation of why we chose this variable for our analyses. Section 2 provides an overview of the data used in this paper particularly focusing on the differences between it and the Mexico data discussed in Guerra (2016). It also describes the methodology we use. We analyze these data using one of two related measures to understand the intensity of sports-related activities across different geographic areas in countries. We also construct measures at the level of a single country in order to compare across entire economies. At the international level, we adopt the revealed comparative advantage (RCA) measure that Balassa (1965) first developed to analyze international trade. Within specific countries, however, we use a population-adjusted version of the RCA measure known as RPOP. Section 3 presents the most relevant findings and Section 4 discusses their limitations. Section 5 concludes with the lessons learned and avenues for future research. While there are limitations on these analyses, they can give policymakers a better understanding of the distribution and concentration of sports across space. Such information can serve as an important input for sports-related investment decisions and other sports-related policies.

This study analyses the performance of macroeconomic policy in South Africa in 2007–2020 and outlines challenges for policy in the coming decade. After remarkable economic growth in 1997–07, South Africa’s progress slowed dramatically in 2009 with the global financial crisis. Real GDP growth decelerated more than in other emerging markets and mineral exporting peers and never recovered pre-crisis levels. In addition, the budget deficit that provided counter-cyclical support to the economy was never reigned in, leading to a rapidly rising public debt load. The study assesses three accounts of South Africa’s post-GFC growth and fiscal slump: (1) an external story; (2) a macro story; and (3) a microeconomic story. Evidence of strong linkages between micro- and political developments and growth performance is provided.