From Manufacturing-Led Export Growth to a Twenty-First Century Inclusive Growth Strategy

The author deconstructs what enabled manufacturing to generate growth and structural transformation. The strategy proposed is multi-pronged, addressing separately, in different sectors, the challenges of learning, foreign exchange, and employment. A carefully designed, coordinated multi-sector strategy, with sectoral policies in agriculture, natural resources, manufacturing, and especially services, has the prospect of attaining the same success as the old manufacturing-led export strategy. To implement it, countries will require active industrial policies based on a new understanding of dynamic comparative advantage. The creation of a global reserve system could help provide the finance required for success. New development strategies will require greater balance among the market, state, and community—a perspective articulated in the Stockholm Statement.