Brookings: Topics - Productivity

Good Things Grown in Scaled Packages: Africa's Agricultural Challenge in Historical Context

John McArthur — Mon, 20 May 2013 12:42:00 -0400

INTRODUCTION

In recent years agriculture has experienced a renaissance of attention among economists and policymakers, especially those focused on sub-Saharan Africa. This heightened attention has been driven partly by research insights, partly by policy initiatives, and partly by a recognition that governments and major international development institutions had been neglecting the issue for many years. It has also been motivated by emerging trends in particular countries like Malawi, which implemented an ambitious small-holder subsidy program starting in 2005 and subsequently registered its first two consecutive years with average cereal yields above two tons per hectare in 2009 and 2010, according to recent Word Bank data.

One indicator of the renaissance is a sizeable increase in official development assistance (ODA) directed towards agriculture. ODA for agriculture was consistently in the range of $4 billion to $5 billion for the decade before 2006. Since then, it has experienced a significant jump, reaching more than $8 billion in 2010. Concurrently average African cereal yields per hectare experienced a slight uptick, rising above 1.3 tons per hectare for the first time in 2009, after oscillating in the range of 0.9-1.2 t/ha for more than thirty years since 1975. It remains to be seen whether these yield increases reflect the beginnings of structural change.

Africa’s average yields still remain much lower than those in any other region. Although Africa’s total factor productivity in agriculture is estimated to have increased in recent decades its food production per capita remains essentially unchanged since 1960. Continued stagnation implies fast-growing costs in terms of lives affected, as the region’s population is slated to surpass one billion people by 2017 and approach two billion by 2050, according to the U.N. population division’s medium projections. A number of recent papers have underscored the major role of agriculture in reducing poverty and accelerating economic growth, so the stagnant trends have important macroeconomic implications. Esther Duflo and colleagues have also investigated questions related to farmer choices around the key input of fertilizer, motivated significantly by arguments surrounding the role of subsidies.

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John McArthur

Image Source: © Mohamed Abd El Ghany / Reuters

U.S. Productivity Growth: An Optimistic Perspective

Martin Neil Baily, James M. Manyika and Shalabh Gupta — Fri, 29 Mar 2013 00:00:00 -0400

ABSTRACT

Recent literature has expressed considerable pessimism about the prospects for both productivity and overall economic growth in the U.S. economy, based either on the idea that the pace of innovation has slowed or on concern that innovation today is hurting job creation. While recognizing the problems facing the economy, this paper offers a more optimistic view of both innovation and future growth, a potential return to the innovation and employment-led growth of the 1990s. Technological opportunities remain strong in advanced manufacturing and the energy revolution will spur new investment, not only in energy extraction, but also in the transportation sector and in energy-intensive manufacturing. Education, health care, infrastructure (construction) and government are large sectors of the economy that have lagged behind in productivity growth historically. This is not because of a lack of opportunities for innovation and change but because of a lack of incentives for change and institutional rigidity.

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U.S. Productivity Growth: An Optimistic Perspective

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Publication: International Productivity Monitor

The Impact of the National Agricultural Advisory Services Program on Household Production and Welfare in Uganda

Geofrey Okoboi, Annette Kuteesa and Mildred Barungi — Wed, 20 Mar 2013 15:08:00 -0400

INTRODUCTION

In the 1990s, developing countries, including Uganda, witnessed wide-ranging reforms in the agricultural sector. In Uganda, these reforms included, among others, liberalization of trade in agricultural inputs, services and output; privatization of state-owned enterprises that supported production and marketing; and downsizing of civil servants who provided extension services. The reforms had both positive and negative consequences. Some of the negative effects of the reforms were income inequality and an increase in the proportion of the very poor in the early 1990s (Muwanga 2001); the collapse of public extension, credit and marketing services (Semana 2004); and falling agricultural productivity, according to the Ministry of Agricultural, Animal Industry and Fisheries (MAAIF 2010).

To overcome the negative consequences of agricultural reforms, the government of Uganda, with support from the World Bank and other donors, restructured the country’s extension system, as part of the Plan for Modernisation of Agriculture (PMA), from unified public extension to a public-private partnership (PPP) extension system. The reforms of the agricultural sector culminated in 2001 with the establishment of the National Agricultural Advisory Services Organization (through an act of Parliament, the National Agricultural Advisory Services Act of 2001) as a semiautonomous agency of the MAAIF, to manage the 25-year National Agricultural Advisory Services (NAADS) program.

In the PPP arrangement, the government contracts out extension services’ provision to private individuals and agencies, which were hailed as an efficient means of delivering services to only those farmers who would demand the service, hence creating a demand-driven extension system that would minimize costs (World Bank 2001). Moreover, under the PPP extension system, it is envisaged that the central government will initially shoulder a greater share of the cost of extension services provision but later gradually shift the cost to the local government and the farmers through their organizations— thus making extension services demanddriven by the private sector.

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Geofrey Okoboi
Annette Kuteesa
Mildred Barungi

A Cheerful Welcome to the Robots, Our Future Work Overlords

Scott Winship — Mon, 18 Feb 2013 00:00:00 -0500

A surprising number of people seem to be freaking out about an imminent takeover by robots. It’s true that only at the fringe is anyone suggesting a Matrix-style dystopia where the machines rise up and enslave us. But the commonly-expressed conviction that technological innovation will immiserate broad segments of society is only somewhat less irrational.

A number of major news outlets and commentators have raised the specter of a doom-like “rise of the robots.” These alarmist speculations allege that technology will leave behind a large portion of the U.S. labor force. One recent piece goes so far to insist that taking on the robots “now poses the central economic dilemma of the Obama era.” The central economic dilemma? Does not compute.

There are two blind spots at work among the neo-Luddites. The first is the tendency to see economic stagnation or decline everywhere, which, it is said, will only worsen. The amount of economic insecurity—and the extent of its increase—have been greatly overstated, as I have argued in the pages of National Affairs. Median income has fallen notably since the onset of the financial crisis, but it was increasing before the recession, and it has been rising again for several months.

It is true that in recent decades, the rate of income growth has been much slower even in good times than in the Golden Age following World War II. However, CBO data indicate that during the expansion of the last decade median income growth rates were no worse than in the 1990s and better than in the 1980s. And as I argue in the latest issue of Breakthrough Journal, we get absolute economic gains today comparable to those of the 1950s and 1960s despite having lower growth rates, because we are so much richer than in the past.

Even if growth rates never return to their glory days, we are on the verge of realizing absolute annual gains that will be permanently larger than in the Golden Age. How those gains are distributed is an important consideration, but the situation is less dire than many believe. Median income has risen by at least one-third since 1979, and the evidence that the labor market is polarizing has been, in the words of Urban Institute and Georgetown economist Harry Holzer, “overblown.”

The second blind spot among the neo-Luddites is their failure to consider the gains we will receive as consumers from technological advances even as they misunderstand the reduced demand for labor technology may create. Technology makes us more productive—it allows us to produce the same stuff, but more cheaply. Too many people hear “producing the same stuff more cheaply” as “producing the same stuff with fewer workers” and see mass unemployment as our fate. Rising productivity actually means “producing the same stuff with fewer hours worked.” That can be achieved by having fewer workers do the same amount of work, but it is also consistent with the same number of workers all scaling back their hours.

It hardly seems worth arguing that most Americans would work less per week and for less of their lifetimes if they could. One hundred years ago essentially all men in their early 60s worked; today just six in ten do, and the typical retirement age has steadily declined (while life expectancy has increased). During their working years, men now have more leisure time than in the past. Work has increased markedly for women, but consistent with their rising education levels, longer delays in marriage and childbearing, and reduced fertility, this is mainly reflective of greater opportunities to balance work and family. Unpaid time doing housework has declined more among women than work has increased, meaning that they too have more leisure time than in the past.

Of course, people will only choose to work less if they can afford to. But technological advance will radically increase productivity—reducing demand for labor—only insofar as it also radically reduces the prices of what we buy. Ignoring this connection leads to absurd fears about the future. Some, apparently, believe we may have a robot economy down the road where machines produce everything, but few humans can afford the output.

Technological development will surely eliminate some specific jobs. But there is little reason to think that the future will look any different from the past in this regard. Productivity gains in manufacturing and other sectors will lower the cost of goods and produce more discretionary income, which people will use to pay other people to do things for them, creating new jobs. Mass leisure will also create other kinds of jobs, such as those devoted to entertaining and informing each other. To the extent that the least-skilled need help, we will be in a much better position to afford safety nets, and our main concern will be the age-old one of discouraging dependency. To the extent that technology increases inequality much of it will be to reward innovators for finding ways to drive our workweek and retirement age down or to induce some to keep working 40-hour weeks.

I, for one, welcome our future robot overlords.

Authors

Scott Winship

Publication: Forbes

Embrace Career Change, But Still Stand for Something

Robert C. Pozen — Thu, 03 Jan 2013 14:56:00 -0500

Imagine that an electric company wants to build a loud, ugly power line on your property. They ask, "How much would we need to pay you to make this happen?" You'd probably demand a lot of money.

Now imagine that that power line already exists on your property. How much would you pay the electric company to get rid of it? Would you pay the same amount — or less?

Most people insist on a larger payment to build the power line than they'd be willing to pay for its removal. This difference is an illustration of status quo bias, a cognitive trait most people share. When presented with a potential change, we usually weigh the potential losses more heavily than the potential gains.

This tendency is completely understandable. Unfortunately, it can also prevent you from getting ahead.

Change is ubiquitous in most facets of our lives. On a basic level, you will likely change jobs more often than you might predict. In a recent study, the Bureau of Labor statistics found that the average person in their sample held eleven jobs between the ages of 18 and 46 — meaning a job-switch once every 2.5 years.

In the broader world, economic, demographic, and technological changes are forcing us all to cope with change whether we want to or not. The financial crisis of 2008 was not some once-in-a-lifetime event; rather, it was one of six financial crises since 1986. On a longer time scale, an aging population has slowed economic growth in Japan and Russia; a growing population has played a key role the impressive economic ascendance of countries such as Brazil and China. Meanwhile, computing power has consistently grown over the past thirty years, changing the way that people shop, learn, and socialize, while also making business logistics much more efficient.

So how can you take advantage of a rapidly changing world? You shouldn't set your career path in stone, or else you'll be tremendously vulnerable to external events beyond your control. At the same time, if you blow whichever way the wind blows, you'll get blown over. So how do you embrace change, while still standing for something?

Embracing Change

Prepare for change by maximizing your options at each step of your career, so that you can be ready to react to whatever the world throws at you. Be proactive. At your current workplace, look for untapped growth opportunities for your organization. Can you expand the customer base? Or use cloud computing in a new way? If you're the first to spot a possible new initiative, you're the likely candidate to lead it.

Get comfortable with uncertainty. No matter your current line of work, you can make smarter decisions by recognizing that the future is inherently unknowable. Be wary of "hockey-stick" projections that use facts from the past to predict fast-growing sales or profits far in the future. Those projections rarely take into account factors such as diminishing returns or potential competitors.

Carefully scrutinize mathematical models that use rigid assumptions about the past. For instance, many models for mortgage-backed securities in the mid-2000s relied on default rates from the previous decade, neglecting the fact that many current mortgage products were different in significant ways. These models failed spectacularly when their assumptions were proven false.

Standing for Something

Although change pervades most aspects of our world, two principles have remained the same over centuries: economic fundamentals and personal integrity. It's easy to get caught up in daily buzz and the latest trends, but these principles are critical for long-term solutions.

In every generation, a group of companies seems to ignore the basic economic fundamentals of profits and losses. In the late 1990s, it was the dotcom companies; many of them shortly went out of business. In the near future, some social media companies might meet the same fate. While growing revenues and alluring ideas can capture the public's interest, ultimately businesses can only survive if they turn a profit.

Similarly, your friends, colleagues, employers, and customers will always put a high premium on your integrity and your reputation. Unfortunately, Warren Buffett was exactly right when he said, "It takes 20 years to build a reputation and five minutes to ruin it."

So, it's critical that you establish for yourself a clear code of ethics. Think about not only your ethical strengths, but also your ethical weaknesses. Write down a situation in which your ethics might be tested. What would you do to maintain your integrity in that situation? When in doubt, apply the New York Times test. How would you feel if your actions were reported on the cover of the New York Times?

In sum, be prepared to learn new skills, take advantage of new trends, and adapt to unforeseen crises — if you don't, you'll be left behind as the world changes without you. But never lose focus on economic fundamentals and, especially, your own personal integrity.

Authors

Robert C. Pozen

Publication: Harvard Business Review

From Investment Management to Time Management

Robert C. Pozen — Sun, 16 Dec 2012 14:58:00 -0500

Editor's Note: The Financial Times spoke with Robert Pozen about this new book, Extreme Productivity, and discussed his thoughts on how to squeeze time from your day as well as his views on asset management. The full interview can be found at ft.com (subscription required).

Why did you write the book?

A couple of years ago, I was teaching a full load of classes at Harvard Business School and someone asked me to do an interview about personal productivity. They were amazed I could get my articles in on time while carrying this workload and they wanted to know how I did it. Anyway, the interview was such a hit on the Harvard Business Review blog and I saw that a lot of people were interested, so it turned into a book. It only took me nine months to write the book.

Your top tip for making people productive?

Email is becoming a problem. Everyone is overwhelmed by emails. People send you hundreds. I have this rule that I think should be applied to the most important emails – OHIO, otherwise known as only handle it once. If you get an email from your boss, respond. Don’t put it off until next week or the week after.

I also have another tip for readers. The trick is not to read more words per minute. It’s to read fewer words per minute, but read the words that are important for your reading. If I am reading the Boston Globe, I am only reading it for sports, so I skip over the other bits of the newspaper. When you read a history book or a science book, I think you should read the introduction and then immediately skip to the conclusion and go back to the body of the book later. If you want to be a speed reader, you have to think first about what your purpose in reading is.

Authors

Robert C. Pozen

Publication: Financial Times

Exports and Export Diversification in Sub-Saharan Africa

Vera Songwe and Deborah Winkler — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 14:00:00 -0500

INTRODUCTION

The past decade has been one of great volatility for Africa but also of substantial progress. At the turn of the decade, many in the developing world wondered if Africa would become “the doomed continent” (Quenum 2000), crippled by political and ethnic tensions (Easterly and Levine 1997), or if in fact Africa could claim the 21st century (Gelb 2000). In that environment, predictions that sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) as a continent was about to enter the fastest growth period of its young 50-year history would have seemed impossible. However, between 2002 and 2008 gross domestic product (GDP) grew by 6.5 percent annually in the region. Commodity-exporting countries as well as non-commodity-exporting countries experienced high growth rates. In fact, some of the non-commodity-exporting countries such as Burkina Faso, Mali and Rwanda grew faster than their commodity-exporting neighbors.

The hitherto poor macroeconomic indicators that had become synonymous with Africa have also changed. Inflation in most countries was brought down to single digits for the first time in decades, debt ratios fell to sustainable levels, and deficits were reduced as countries moved to consolidate the size of government, rationalize spending, and obtain debt write-offs. In an overall favorable external economic environment, these reforms quickly began to produce results. Foreign exchange reserves, including gold, increased more than 300 percent from $37 billion in 2001 to $154 billion in 2008. Net flows of foreign direct investment more than doubled from $14 billion in 2001 to $34 billion in 2008. Goods exports over the period 2000–2008 grew by 18 percent per year as the continent became increasingly more open and globally connected.

The channels through which export expansion enhances aggregate productivity and growth are well-known. Exports allow for specialization in a country’s comparative advantage and thereby raise growth. Ricardo, in his famed theory of comparative advantage, showed that countries benefit by specializing in the production of those goods with the lowest opportunity cost and trading the surplus of production over domestic demand, taking as given appropriate exchange-rate regimes. Under this model, a country will quickly specialize in sectors in which it has a comparative advantage. The new trade theory à la Helpman and Krugman (1985) and generalized by Grossman and Helpman (1991), however, shifted the focus from the static gains from trade to dynamic ones in which the increased investment, knowledge and technology associated with increased productivity growth can transform trade patterns and accelerate overall economic growth. Under the new theory, specialization is a result of scale and concomitant efficiencies.

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Authors

Vera Songwe
Deborah Winkler

Image Source: © Thierry Gouegnon / Reuters

Extreme Productivity: Taking Time to Make Time

Robert C. Pozen — Mon, 10 Dec 2012 15:32:00 -0500

Editor's Note: Robert Pozen speaks with the Harvard Business Review about his new book, Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours (HarperCollins Publishers).

In Extreme Productivity, Pozen offers performance-enhancing tips on everything from how to sleep better on overnight business flights (window seat, no alcohol, earplugs, and eyeshades) to dealing with employees' mistakes ("No matter how spectacularly the project flopped, don't attack the person").

Classic productivity books often focus on time management, but Extreme Productivity takes a much broader look. It reads more like a businessperson's handbook. Did you intend that?

It takes a lot more than organizing your schedule to be productive. I wanted to discuss skills that have been critical in my own career. Communication is one—reading, writing, and speaking. Another is how you operate within your organization and deal with both those above you and those who report to you. I also wanted people to think about how they are managing their careers in the evolving context of their own professional and personal lives.

The book addresses aspects of business life that are vexing to many of us. For example, what are some ways to make meetings more productive?

You should not schedule meetings that last more than an hour, or 90 minutes at the most. There are tremendous diminishing returns in lengthier meetings. When you only have an hour, you don't waste time on nonproductive tangents. You also need to think about how you structure the meeting. When meeting materials arrive in your email five minutes before the meeting starts, it's a signal that the person in charge hasn't laid the groundwork for a productive use of time. There should be adequate time in advance for everyone to prepare for a thoughtful discussion.

All meetings should have an effective close. People should think, "What are the to-dos, and who's going to do them?" Senior executives tend to think that they can accomplish this by just telling people what to do. But there's a big difference between assigning a task to be completed by next Tuesday vs. introducing a challenge, getting buy-in on addressing that challenge, and having everyone come together on a way it can get done by a mutually agreed deadline.

On the subject of management styles, you write about the wisdom of adapting your personal style to that of your boss. What if your boss's style is interfering with your productivity?

By "adapting," I don't mean that your style needs to be the same as that of your boss, but you should be in sync and try to make sure your skills complement each other. For example, if your supervisor is a "big-picture" thinker, you could balance that by being detail-oriented. The notion is to understand your boss and position yourself accordingly. And if the differences you have with your boss are compromising your ability to do your job, you just have to take the leap and talk about it directly.

Those are sensitive conversations. How do you make them productive?

People fear that if they air their differences with their bosses, they may be fired, but that's not my experience. If you raise topics politely, explain your perspective on the issues, and stay away from personal attacks, I think most bosses will respond positively. Even better, go into that conversation with a suggestion or two that would lead to better results. You may think you're sticking your neck out, but if the conflict is there and neither of you addresses it, you are probably not long for that job anyway.

You take exception in the book to the practice, at many professional firms, of organizing work around billable hours. How does that hurt productivity?

The most obvious answer is that there is a negative financial incentive to solving problems quickly and efficiently. Hourly billing is a deeply ingrained model of measuring work, but it comes from a time that predated our knowledge-based economy. When your goal is a great marketing plan or a brilliant idea for a software system, it doesn't matter if it took 2 hours or 20 hours. The client is paying for the quality of the solution.

What do you think about the issue of flexible work hours?

There's a long way to go yet, but once you embrace the concept that results are the most important factor in evaluating performance, if someone leaves early or comes in late in order to take care of a family matter, it's a non-issue—as long as that person is getting their work done and achieving good results. And that concept of being able to attend to outside obligations should be as important to those at the organization's highest levels as it is to middle managers.

We often find that work obligations overwhelm our best intentions when it comes to spending time with family. How do you juggle conflicting priorities?

Many managers insist that their jobs routinely require them to stay late at the office, but when you press them, they admit that isn't true. Some occasional emergencies need to take precedence over everything else, but unless you work in a hospital, those situations are rare. Even if you have to catch up with work after dinner, take a couple of hours every day to connect with the people in your life who should matter most.

You stress the importance of reading, writing, and public speaking. Any hints?

When it comes to reading, prioritize. Determine which information is most important to you, and spend more time reading that information care- fully. I've worked with a number of high-school students, and what I tell them about writing is just as valid for managers: begin with an outline. It keeps you from getting halfway through and not knowing where you should go from there. With public speaking, don't read from a script. Instead, have one piece of paper with an introductory sentence, brief notes on four or five points that you want to make, and a conclusion sentence.

You advise against doing too much career planning. Why?

I think people should keep their options open. An annual self-assessment is a wonderful tool, but it is not productive to sit in a room and try to figure out where you want to be in 10 or 20 years. Instead, think about what you can do in the next year or two to broaden your learning, experiences, and choices. Career planning should be an exercise you engage in throughout your life, and it should take into account the changes that occur along the way.

Authors

Robert C. Pozen

Publication: Harvard Business Review

Exercise Increases Productivity

Robert C. Pozen — Wed, 24 Oct 2012 11:53:00 -0400

Everyone knows that exercise can improve your health. Exercise is a key part of managing your weight and maintaining healthy hearts, lungs, and other bodily systems. But did you know that exercise can make you more productive? The latest research shows that a regular exercise routine can make you happier, smarter, and more energetic.

A habit of regular exercise will help keep you mentally sharper throughout your entire life. As you age, your body generates fewer and fewer brain cells (a process called neurogenesis). However, early research in mice suggests that exercise can help prevent this slowdown. In other words, by the time they reach their 50s, 60s, and 70s, people who exercise might have more brain cells than their more sedentary peers -- giving them a major advantage in the workplace.

Over a shorter time-frame, an exercise routine can give you more energy throughout the day. Most of your cells contain components called mitochondria, often referred to as the cell's "power plant." Mitochondria produce the chemical that your body uses as energy, known as ATP. Physical exercise stimulates the development of new mitochondria within your cells, meaning that your body will be able to produce more ATP over time. That gives you more energy to exert yourself physically, but it also means more energy for your brain, boosting your mental output.

To obtain these benefits, you don't need to sweat up a storm. In a randomized controlled trial, researchers from the University of Georgia split people into three groups: low-intensity exercise, moderate-intensity exercise, and a control group (no exercise). During the six-week experiment, both "exercise" groups reported growing levels of energy (compared to the control group), but there was no discernable difference between the moderate- and low-intensity exercise groups. In fact, the low-intensity group reported less fatigue than the moderate-intensity group.

This experiment suggests that exercise can make you feel more energized within a few weeks. By contrast, the effect of exercise on your mood is immediate. When you exercise, your body releases several different chemicals in your brain, collectively known as neurotransmitters. Although the mechanisms aren't fully understood, these neurotransmitters seem to reduce the discomfort of exercise and create the sensation often referred to as "runner's high."

This experience is highly pleasant, as British economist George MacKerron discovered in a unique, ongoing experiment. MacKerron and his team recruited over 50,000 volunteers to download an app to their smartphone. Roughly once a day, the volunteers' phones "beep," at which point each person reports what they are doing and how happy they are. The preliminary results? Exercise makes people very happy -- only sex makes people happier. And the happier you are, the more productive you can be.

Despite all these benefits, many people find it hard to exercise regularly. They buy expensive equipment and wear the latest fashion in gym clothes, but they don't actually get around to working out. To get into an exercise routine, I suggest in my new book, Extreme Productivity, that you organize a group of friends or family to work out together to keep you honest. This group of people can exert peer pressure on those mornings, lunches, or afternoons when you just don't want to exercise.

Fortunately, working out with others is also more fun, as researchers found by studying elite male rowers at Oxford University. The rowers first exercised on a rowing machine in the company of their teammates; the next day, they performed the same workout at the same intensity, but by themselves. After each session, researchers tested the pain tolerance of each of the athletes, finding a higher pain tolerance when the rowers worked out together. The researchers concluded that exercising with others enhances the release of the pain-suppressing (and happiness-inducing) chemicals in your brain.

The evidence is compelling. A modest exercise habit can help keep you sharper into old age, give you more energy to take on the day, and improve your mood. So stop making excuses, find a group of like-minded peers, and start exercising today!

Authors

Robert C. Pozen

Publication: Huffington Post

Labor Strikes Are Becoming a Rising Concern across Africa

Anne W. Kamau — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 15:34:00 -0400

Since the start of this year, the number of labor strikes by workers in both the private and public sectors has been on the rise across Africa. About 280,000 teachers and over 10,000 lecturers have gone on strike in Malawi, Kenya and Swaziland. All of these strikes have been over wage disputes and millions of students have been affected. The university and college strike of 8,000 lecturers in Kenya affected about 200,000 students preparing for their October exams.

The public health care sector that serves the majority of Kenya’s 40 million people has also been affected by labor strikes recently. About 2,300 doctors went on a three-week strike over wage disputes and poor working conditions. During that time, several patients died in hospitals since only a few doctors went into work to handle emergency cases.

Africa’s private sector is not immune to these labor strikes. In fact, it has recently been hit hard by ongoing labor disputes and walkouts. For example, investor confidence in Namibia has fallen as a result of the many ongoing strikes across the country. The country’s broadcasting cooperation staff was on strike for a full week making the airwaves silent. Agribank workers went on strike for two weeks paralyzing banking operations and only returned to work after a wage increase of 8 percent was agreed upon. Recently, South Africa’s mining sector was slowed by a six-week long strike of thousands of Lonmin company workers. The Lonmin strike not only caused a surge in global platinum prices by 1.3 percent, but also led to deaths of 45 people, 34 of which were a result of clashes with the police while the rest were because of clashes between rival unions. The strikes in South Africa have now spread to the country’s gold mining companies, shutting down all seven of Anglogold’s mines in the country and two of Gold Fields’ mines.

Sub-Saharan Africa is not the only part of the continent experiencing these problems. After the democratic uprisings that brought an end to Mubarak’s rule in Egypt, a series of labor strikes followed. The country’s textile industry—a key economic driver in Egypt—was badly hurt when over 30,000 workers staged a week-long strike over insufficient wages. Around the same time, the Egyptian ceramics industry also saw strikes with workers from private companies.

The rising number of strikes across Africa, especially in the public sector, is a cause for concern given their operational scale, the costs involved and their length of time.

Many of the strikes in the public sector are driven by wage disputes. Often, African governments can be discriminatory in the way they award wage increases for its civil servants. In other instances, African governments have reneged on promises of wage increases or reforms. For example, Kenyan members of parliament in the past have increased their own salaries while keeping the salaries of civil servants the same. The Kenyan government also promised to carry out reforms in the public health care sector, improve working conditions and increase wages for doctors, but then never followed through.

For the most part, these strikes have been effective in achieving resolutions for the grievances of workers, albeit at high costs. Lives have been lost, revenues have suffered and learning hours have been wasted.

When a wave of labor strikes paralyzes public sector services, the government is often to blame. A government is responsible for ensuring that resources are prioritized and shared fairly across sectors and that civil servant wages are synchronized equitably. For many African countries, some unnecessary disruptions to the provision of public services could be avoided if wage increases for all civil servants were factored in from the onset of budgeting process. In the private sector, companies have the responsibility to ensure that workers are properly paid and working conditions are safe and sanitary.

At the same time, the power of labor unions may need to be kept in check—especially unions of essential emergency professionals, such as doctors and nurses. But there must be a careful balancing act since the collective bargaining rights of workers and unions need to be protected as well.

The rising number of labor strikes in Africa is a wake-up call for African governments to consider the following: First, look at labor markets with a renewed interest to revise laws governing the role and powers accorded to collective bargaining unions with a view to streamline them. Second, revise minimum wages, wage increases and dispute resolution policies in line with the latest economic developments in the country and international standards to ensure fairness and equity. Third, ensure that negotiations involving unions that represent essential emergency professionals do not break down and go to strike since people’s lives could be at stake. Finally, deliberately incorporate wage increase policies in the national budgeting process. These reforms would go a long way in minimizing the growing number of strikes across Africa.

Authors

Anne W. Kamau

Image Source: © SIPHIWE SIBEKO / Reuters

Skimming Your Way to 'Extreme Productivity'

Robert C. Pozen — Mon, 15 Oct 2012 13:23:00 -0400

It's easy to get overwhelmed by a stack of reading materials sitting on your desk. It can take hours to read a long academic paper or a dense government report—hours that you can't spare.

Some professionals address this challenge by trying to read as many words per minute as possible, in the style of Evelyn Wood. But even if you successfully increase your reading speed, you probably aren't digesting much of the material.

So if you want to read faster, you shouldn't try to read more words per minute. Instead, you should read fewer words per minute—those words most relevant to your work.

When I was mentoring a few students in high school, I gave them an exercise to help them read faster. After they read a chapter from their chemistry textbook, I asked them to write out the main points that they would need to remember for their final exam two months later. Then I told them to look back through the chapter and see how quickly they could have read the chapter if they were focused on finding those main points. Before long, they were reading chapters in half the time—and still doing well on their exams.

Here's how to apply this lesson to your professional reading. First, before you even pick up a text, you should ask yourself why you're reading that particular text. Are you trying to understand the main ideas? Are you trying to find one specific fact or detailed example? Are you trying to judge the rigor of the author's argument? Don't start reading until you're satisfied that you know your purpose for reading.

Next, read the introduction (or executive summary). Pay special attention to the "thesis statement" or "theme paragraph." That sentence or paragraph can effectively unlock the structure and ideas of the entire text. After reading the introduction, skip directly to the conclusion. The conclusion tells you where the author is headed. If the introduction poses a question, the conclusion often answers it and provides the key takeaways.

In fact, depending on your reading purpose, the introduction and conclusion may have given you all you need to know. If not, you can move on the body of the text to help you clarify key points or explain confusing concepts.

To quickly read the body of a text, start by taking a look at its structure. Many articles have "roadmap" paragraphs at the end of the introduction, which describe how the article is organized. Most likely, the text has headings that separate the various sections. Pay close attention to the roadmap paragraph and the headings. Ruthlessly skip those sections that don't appear to be relevant to your purpose.

If a section is relevant to your reading purpose, you still don't have to read it word for word. Instead, you should actively skim those sections: read the topic sentence of every paragraph and then decide whether the rest of that paragraph is worth reading.

This decision, of course, will depend on your reading purpose: certain paragraphs are important for finding examples and unimportant for understanding the main points, and vice versa. I usually skip the rest of a paragraph if I can tell that it will just recite the conventional wisdom. I pay close attention to material that appears to challenge the commonly accepted worldview.

Unfortunately, "skimming" often gets a bad rap. Many people think that someone who skims is just being lazy. Sometimes, they're right: if you're just passively moving your eyes across the page, you probably aren't learning anything. But my strategy isn't passive at all: after reading every topic sentence, I actively decide whether the rest of that paragraph is worth the 20-30 seconds of my time that it would take to read it. When reading a long article, that answer, quite often, is "no."

So don't read the full text of every article, paper, or memo that is handed to you. Probably, most of the text won't help you achieve your goals: either you'll already understand some of the material or a large portion of the text will cover a topic only tangential to your work. Instead, decide on your reading purpose, and actively skim the text to satisfy that purpose.

Authors

Robert C. Pozen

Publication: CNBC

How to Master the Art of Productivity

Robert C. Pozen — Mon, 01 Oct 2012 11:53:00 -0400

Editor's note: Dan Schawbel of Forbes interviews Robert Pozen regarding his latest book, Extreme Productivity: Boost Your Results, Reduce Your Hours.

When you were at Fidelity, how did you balance your time?

When I was president of Fidelity, I made a point of getting home almost every night at 7pm for dinner. Those dinners enhanced our family life and gave me a break from work. I also learned that I didn’t need to stay late every night to get ahead. If I still had work to do, I would retreat to my home office around 10pm, after my children had gone to sleep. The break often let me come up with fresh solutions to thorny problems.

What are your best productivity tips for workers who are looking to get ahead in their careers?

In thinking about their careers, many young professionals try to figure out their ultimate goal – say, becoming CEO of their company, or being appointed a federal judge. But that perspective is unrealistic – the world is far too random for such rigid planning. Instead, young people should take a step-by-step approach to career planning. They should think about what next step would increase their career options in the future. That means gaining transferable skills or knowledge—such as leadership, or computer programming. It also means growing their professional network by working with a wide variety of other professionals.

Do you think there should still be a 9-to-5 workday or that companies should focus more on results over where and when work gets done?

For most knowledge workers, a 9-to-5 workday (or even worse, an 8-to-8 workday) makes little sense. Your productivity shouldn’t be measured in terms of hours you log at the office, but rather the results you achieve for your organization or for your clients. So managers should offer flex-time to their trusted employees, and downplay face-time at the office. For example, why not let parents attend their children’s soccer games on a weekday afternoon? They will get the work done at another time, and you’ll earn their loyalty and respect.

In this hyper-connected world, it’s easy to get distracted. How do you recommend workers stay focused?

Email and mobile phones can be great contributors to productivity, but also great detractors by wasting lots of time. So I urge you to ignore a large chunk of your emails and then use OHIO—short for “only handle it once”—for the important ones. If an email is important, respond to it immediately. If you wait a few days, you will forget it or take several minutes to find it again. As to your cell phone, I strongly urge you to get a separate ring tone for your boss so that you can easily ignore all other after-hours calls if you so desire. And make an agreement with your boss that you’ll be unreachable during certain times—such as family dinner. Don’t be afraid to “unplug”—turn off your phone, and close your laptop.

What is the best way to efficiently use your time at the office?

To use your time efficiently at work, you need to prepare in advance. First, you should write down your goals for the next week and the next year, and then carefully consider which ones are most important to you and your organization. Next, you should each night go over your schedule for the next day and see if it is consistent with your highest priorities. You might find that your schedule is mainly reactive to the needs of others, rather than your own goals. To better align your schedule with your priorities, don’t be afraid to decline invitations to unnecessary meetings, and recognize that certain tasks only require a quick and dirty effort.

Authors

Robert C. Pozen

Publication: Forbes

Financing for a Fairer, More Prosperous Kenya: A Review of the Public Spending Challenges and Options for Selected Arid and Semi-Arid Counties

Kevin Watkins and Woubedle Alemayehu — Mon, 24 Sep 2012 13:06:00 -0400

INTRODUCTION

In August, 2010 the government of Kenya adopted a new constitution. This followed a referendum in which an overwhelming majority of Kenyans voted for change. The decisive impetus for reform came from the widespread violence and political crisis that followed the 2007 election. While claims of electoral fraud provided the immediate catalyst for violence, the deeper causes were to be found in the interaction of a highly centralized ‘winner-take-all’ political system with deep social disparities based in part on group identity (Hanson 2008).

Provisions for equity figure prominently in the new constitution. Backed by a bill of rights that opens the door to legal enforcement, citizenship rights have been strengthened in many areas,including access to basic services. ‘Equitable sharing’ has been introduced as a guiding principle for public spending. National and devolved governments are now constitutionally required to redress social disparities, target disadvantaged areas and provide affirmative action for marginalized groups.

Translating these provisions into tangible outcomes will not be straightforward. Equity is a principle that would be readily endorsed by most policymakers in Kenya and Kenya’s citizens have provided their own endorsement through the referendum. However, there is an ongoing debate over what the commitment to equity means in practice, as well as over the pace and direction of reform. Much of that debate has centered on the constitutional injunction requiring ‘equitable sharing’ in public spending.

On most measures of human development, Kenya registers average outcomes considerably above those for sub-Saharan Africa as a region. Yet the national average masks extreme disparities—and the benefits of increased prosperity have been unequally shared.

There are compelling grounds for a strengthened focus on equity in Kenya. In recent years, the country has maintained a respectable, if less than spectacular, record on economic growth. Social indicators are also on an upward trend. On most measures of human development, Kenya registers average outcomes considerably above those for sub-Saharan Africa as a region. Yet the national average masks extreme disparities—and the benefits of increased prosperity have been unequally shared. Some regions and social groups face levels of deprivation that rank alongside the worst in Africa. Moreover, the deep fault lines running through society are widely perceived as a source of injustice and potential political instability.

High levels of inequality in Kenya raise wider concerns. There has been a tendency in domestic debates to see ‘equitable sharing’ as a guiding principle for social justice, rather than as a condition for accelerated growth and enhanced economic efficiency. Yet international evidence strongly suggests that extreme inequality—especially in opportunities for education— is profoundly damaging for economic growth. It follows that redistributive public spending has the potential to support growth.

The current paper focuses on a group of 12 counties located in Kenya’s Arid and Semi-Arid Lands (ASALs). They are among the most disadvantaged in the country. Most are characterized by high levels of income poverty, chronic food insecurity and acute deprivation across a wide range of social indicators.

Nowhere is the deprivation starker than in education. The ASAL counties account for a disproportionately large share of Kenya’s out-of-school children, pointing to problems in access and school retention. Gender disparities in education are among the widest in the country. Learning outcomes for the small number of children who get through primary school are for the most part abysmal, even by the generally low national average standards.

Unequal public spending patterns have played no small part in creating the disparities that separate the ASAL counties from the rest of Kenya—and ‘equitable sharing’ could play a role in closing the gap. But what would a more equitable approach to public spending look like in practice?

This paper addresses that question. It looks in some detail at education for two reasons. First, good quality education is itself a powerful motor of enhanced equity. It has the potential to equip children and youth with the skills and competencies that they need to break out of cycles of poverty and to participate more fully in national prosperity. If Kenya is to embark on a more equitable pattern of development, there are strong grounds for prioritizing the creation of more equal opportunities in education. Second, the education sector illustrates many of the wider challenges and debates that Kenya’s policymakers will have to address as they seek to translate constitutional provisions into public spending strategies. In particular, it highlights the importance of weighting for indicators that reflect need in designing formulae for budget allocations.

Our broad conclusion is that, while Kenya clearly needs to avoid public spending reforms that jeopardize service delivery in wealthier counties, redistributive measures are justified on the grounds of efficiency and equity.

The paper is organized as follows. Part 1 provides an overview of the approach to equity enshrined in the constitution. While the spirit of the constitution is unequivocal, the letter is open to a vast array of interpretations. We briefly explore the implications of a range of approaches. Our broad conclusion is that, while Kenya clearly needs to avoid public spending reforms that jeopardize service delivery in wealthier counties, redistributive measures are justified on the grounds of efficiency and equity. Although this paper focuses principally on basic services, we caution against approaches that treat equity as a matter of social sector financing to the exclusion of growth-oriented productive investment.

Part 2 provides an analysis of some key indicators on poverty, health and nutrition. Drawing on household expenditure data, the report locates the 12 ASAL counties in the national league table for the incidence and depth of poverty. Data on health outcomes and access to basic services provide another indicator of the state of human development. While there are some marked variations across counties and indicators, most of the 12 counties register levels of deprivation in poverty and basic health far in excess of those found in other areas.

Part 3 shifts the focus to education. Over the past decade, Kenya has made considerable progress in improving access to basic education. Enrollment rates in primary education have increased sharply since the elimination of school fees in 2003. Transition rates to secondary school are also rising. The record on learning achievement is less impressive. While Kenya lacks a comprehensive national learning assessment, survey evidence points to systemic problems in education quality. In both access and learning, children in the ASAL counties—especially female children—are at a considerable disadvantage. After setting out the national picture, the paper explores the distinctive problems facing these counties.

In Part 4 we look beyond Kenya to wider international experience. Many countries have grappled with the challenge of reducing disparities between less-favored and more-favored regions. There are no blueprints on offer. However, there are some useful lessons and guidelines that may be of some relevance to the policy debate in Kenya. The experience of South Africa may be particularly instructive given the weight attached to equity in the post-apartheid constitution.

Part 5 of the paper explores a range of approaches to financial allocations. Converting constitutional principle into operational practice will require the development of formulae-based approaches. From an equitable financing perspective there is no perfect model. Any formula that is adopted will involve trade-offs between different goals. Policymakers have to determine what weight to attach to different dimensions of equity (for example, gender, income, education and health), the time frame for achieving stated policy goals, and whether to frame targets in terms of outcomes or inputs. These questions go beyond devolved financing. The Kenyan constitution is unequivocal in stipulating that the ‘equitable sharing’ provision applies to all public spending. We therefore undertake a series of formula-based exercises illustrating the allocation patterns that would emerge under different formulae, with specific reference to the 12 ASAL focus counties and to education.

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Authors

Kevin Watkins
Woubedle Alemayehu

Extending the Learning Community: Rural Radio, Social Learning and Farm Productivity in Ghana

Olumide Taiwo and Emmanuel Asmah — Tue, 17 Apr 2012 14:34:00 -0400

INTRODUCTION

Agricultural productivity remains a crucial factor in poverty reduction and rural transformation in Africa. After a long period of decline and stagnation, there have recently been reports of improved performance by the agricultural sector in many if not all countries on the continent. Mugera and Ojede (2011) provide a good survey of the literature on this subject and show that a variety of changes have made this progress possible. The studies cited in their survey emphasize the impact of remarkable changes in farm inputs such as crop varieties, fertilizer, pesticides and water resources (rainfall and irrigation), and the infrastructural changes that have made these gains possible, such as market reforms and extension services. However, whereas changes in inputs and markets are well captured, changes in extension services are muted in these reports, to the effect that credit is given to the effectiveness of orthodox agricultural extension. To the contrary, a survey of attitudes toward and experiences with orthodox extension services shows that farmers have largely been abandoning those services since the beginning of the last decade.

The implication is that the credit given to extension services is largely misplaced, and the analyses omit a crucial change in the form of the knowledge to which farmers are adapting and the ways in which this knowledge is being disseminated. The literature on knowledge systems clearly distinguishes between formal or explicit knowledge that is based on scientific evidence and informal or tacit knowledge that is experimental and is acquired after a given practice has proved fruitful (Roling 1992). Whereas orthodox extension services focus on application of the former, there is evidence that farmers are instead shifting to the latter. In a survey of farmers’ perspectives on agricultural extension in the East Akim District of Ghana reported by Boateng (2006), two-thirds of farmers surveyed expressed dissatisfaction with orthodox extension services. Among the dissatisfied majority, the main reasons cited were the unreliability of the service (47 percent) and the enormous costs of applying the new techniques (47 percent). In their responses to other questions in the survey, the farmers unanimously declared extension services as unreliable because “they were not involved in the development of technologies passed on to them by the experts” (Boateng 2006, 24). This attitude toward orthodox extension services is not a “new millennium” experience. Conley and Udry (2010) found from a survey conducted between 1996 and 1998 among pineapple farmers in three villages in southern Ghana that only one in three farmers took advice from an extension agent from the Ghanaian Ministry of Food and Agriculture. They found from their data that average fertilizer use is less than one-tenth of the 400 kilograms per hectare recommended by extension officers. Their analysis and findings show that farmers adjust fertilizer use not after the recommendations of the extension officers but following the experiences of other farmers in their neighborhood.

Recent developments in communication and socialization infrastructure have extended the sphere of social learning beyond village borders. In the Ghanaian context, the rural radio phenomenon has successfully moved the borders of social learning from the village to the range of radio broadcasts. “Rural radio stations,” a term used interchangeably with “community radio stations,” are FM radio stations that have been established with the aim to broadcast to a rural audience that is predominantly engaged in agriculture. These new stations are not mere extensions of national FM radio stations to rural areas but are new FM stations that are owned and situated in rural areas. As noted by Girard (2001, 6), “In 1985 the term ‘rural radio’ usually referred to a division within the national broadcaster that produced programs in the capital and broadcast them to the countryside. Now rural radio is local radio.” A study by Chapman and others (2003) suggests that the community element of rural radio encourages the active participation of the audience, the engagement of the community’s intellectual resources, and community ownership of the radio station. In particular, community radio stations are set up with the aim to “enable marginalised communities and groups to generate and share their knowledge and experience” (Quarmyne 2001). In terms of their programs, they focus on livelihood and development issues, transmit most of their events in local dialects and cater strongly to occupational segments such as farmers and fishermen. The main advantage is that the uneducated rural population in those communities can and does participate in these programs. Radio Ada, the first community radio station in Ghana, started operations in February 1998, shortly after the liberalization of the Ghanaian airwaves in 1996. At the end of 2005, there were seven operational community radio stations in Ghana with broadcast ranges covering large swaths of seven of the country’s ten regions. It is estimated that community radio stations reached between a quarter and two-fifths of the country’s area as of that time (Whaites 2005).

The development of rural radio has brought about a change in the content of radio transmission that is accessible to rural audiences. McKay (2003, 4), in his qualitative study of radio participation in a fishing community, cited a fishmonger’s account:

The first [radio we bought] was 16 years ago. Back then we tuned to the radio a little, but we mainly played cassettes. My husband is educated, so he liked tuning to where they spoke English. But if my husband was not in the house, then we put the cassette in the tape player and played gospel songs. Now we listen to Radio Ada, because of the Dangme being spoken.

Whereas learning from neighbors is confined to members of the same village, rural radio stations enable individuals to learn from more distant counterparts. McKay (2003, 3) cited a fisherman who was knowledgeable about the development occurring among fishmongers in his Anyakpor community as saying:

Anyakpor women, when they’ve finished smoking, use a certain grass named lale giving colour to the fish here. With a programme from another community along the coast here, I learned that there’s another grass which is called zue which is used in giving the fish colour and it is better than the lale the Anyakpor fishmongers are using. So the women here are changing to use zue.

In Ghana, rural radio has been used to promote the adoption of a high-yield rice seed named New Rice for Africa. The impact of this promotion, as documented by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation (2010), is a doubling of demand for the seed among farmers between 2008 and 2009. However, the report shows that the adoption of the seed variety is made possible by having farmers talk to themselves on the radio. Citing a 46-year-old female rural rice farmer, Faustina, who experienced a turnaround on her rice farm, the report makes the case that it is often more convincing to learn about a new yield-improving technology from a farmer than from an extension agent. “Hearing about the rice from other farmers made it more convincing,” says Faustina.

In this paper, we attempt to evaluate the impact of social learning through rural radio on crop yields in Ghana. We lay the theoretical foundation and examine the literature in the next section and follow with a section describing our identification strategy and examining the data. We then present descriptive statistics and our results, discuss the results, and offer conclusions.

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Authors

Olumide Taiwo
Emmanuel Asmah

Latin America Economic Perspectives - All Together Now: The Challenge of Regional Integration

Lucio Castro, Luciano Cohan and Eduardo Levy-Yeyati — Mon, 16 Apr 2012 11:18:00 -0400

INTRODUCTION: MISSING PARTS

It has been a good ride. After the dismal 1990s, which stigmatized Latin American and Caribbean economies as the paradigmatic emerging markets (a high-risk/high-return bet on inherently unstable countries doomed by the original sin of chronic mismanagement), the 2000s were something of a revelation. Dollarized external obligations shrank or were replaced by more manageable domestic debt issued in local currency, increasing tax revenues enhanced the fiscal capacity to reduce inequality and poverty, and policy continuity and consistency denied the stereotype of a region perennially oscillating between political extremes. Populism, all of a sudden, became smart pragmatism.

For many of the region’s countries –particularly those in South America– this progress was to no small degree aided by an exceptional external context of low inflation, declining financing costs, stable global growth and supportive terms of trade. If anything, the region’s governments took advantage of global tailwinds to reduce their long-dated financial vulnerabilities –an achievement that allowed them to implement, for the first time in decades, countercyclical policies that limited the depth and length of the contagion from the 2008– 9 global crisis, feeding the hope that the 2010s might be, for once, the Latin American decade.

Yet first impressions often overshoot reality. Much as the skeptical view prevalent at the start of the century may have exaggerated the irreversible nature of some of Latin America’s earlier flaws, the goldilocks picture of the region’s miracle overlooks a number of drawbacks that were temporarily dwarfed by the long bonanza. Now that the world has become less supportive, these drawbacks are returning to the foreground.

If anything, it appears that this decade, rather than marking the culmination of a virtuous process, poses a challenge. After working out the macrofinancial constraints that thwarted development policies in the past, can these countries address the pending tasks and issues that are critical to consolidate their gains and keep up the momentum?

We have tackled some of these tasks and issues in past editions of the Brookings Latin American Economic Perspectives. The region’s gradual primarization of exports, its inadequate investment in physical infrastructure and modest productivity growth, and its deficits in social development and education, all cast doubt on its growth prospects looking forward.

In this edition, we concentrate on another economic dimension on which the region is falling behind: commercial integration. Our comparative analyses reveal that, in both the depth and quality of regional integration, the Latin American and Caribbean economies are lagging from their emerging peers in Asia. And this is happening at a time when the missing intraindustry trade could provide the economies of scale needed to increase productivity in nonprimary sectors, and when regional markets offer a welcome counterpoint to the growing Chinese influence and to a global context that, even as the worldwide financial crisis subsides, will not be as stable and supportive as in the 2000s. Chapter 3 highlights several reasons why the wave of free trade agreements in the 1990s fell short of achieving true commercial integration, and it argues that a more proactive political agenda is needed to counter short-term economic incentives to diversify away from the region.

The chapter also tackles another topical aspect of regional integration: the pooling of financial resources to cope with the increasingly recurrent bouts of global financial distress. Now that the long debate about global financial safety nets –namely, multilateral liquidity facilities designed to mitigate the impact of financial contagion– seems to have reached its limit, can the discussion move forward at the regional level? It has been correctly pointed out that because the Latin American and Caribbean economies are all hit by global shocks in the same way, they cannot reduce the needed stock of aggregate liquidity by insuring each other. However, as we show in the pages that follow, regional cooperation in a reserve pool has additional advantages beyond the conventional diversification gains. Moreover, a regional pool is the natural vehicle for cooperatively mustering regional and multilateral resources, which is perhaps the missing link in the dysfunctional global safety net.

Trade and liquidity, external demand and financial stability—these are the two fronts on which the region can help itself in the next decade. Two varieties of integration important enough to be at the top of the regional agenda, and at the center of this report.

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Authors

Lucio Castro
Luciano Cohan
Eduardo Levy-Yeyati

Image Source: Enrique de la Osa / Reuters