For low-income countries to develop, their economies need to transform from rural and agricultural to urban and industrialised. In many sub-Saharan countries, urbanization to date has outpaced industrialization and structural change has largely been from agriculture to non-traded services. For these countries, many questions and challenges loom. Will they ever experience industrialization? If not, does it matter? Can they develop relying on services and the production and export of primary commodities? Finding answers to these questions matters enormously for growth and poverty reduction.

The UK’s Department for International Development (DfID) has awarded a large-scale multi-year research grant to a consortium of renowned researchers, with the FEB’s Groningen Growth and Development Centre (GGDC) as one of the core partners, alongside the Oxford Department of International Development, the University of Notre Dame, the Yale Research Institute on Innovation and Scale (Y-Rise) and the African Center for Economic Transformation (ACET). The consortium will be administered by the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR) and has started on March 1, 2020.

During this project, the consortium will conduct and commission research on structural transformation, with a special emphasis on countries in Sub-Saharan Africa, in particular Ghana, Zambia, Rwanda, Uganda, and Ethiopia. The GGDC will lead the work on generating novel measures of development and put country experiences in international perspective. This builds on our long and deep expertise in constructing comprehensive databases as a basis for research on economic growth and development.

Gaaitzen de Vries, Robert Inklaar and Marcel Timmer will be the GGDC members most closely involved in this project.

For more information: Robert Inklaar or Gaaitzen de Vries