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Economic Development

Can Industrial Policy Help Revive Struggling Regions?

A new paper co-authored by Yale SOM’s Cameron LaPoint looks at an effort in 1980s Japan to narrow economic inequalities between geographic regions, in order to understand the potential impact of the similar U.S. CHIPS and Science Act, enacted in 2022.

President Joe Biden with a quantum computer during a tour of an IBM facility in Poughkeepsie, New York, in 2022.
  • Can diplomacy benefit business?

    The days of U.S. boycotts of South Africa are long gone. The country is an economic powerhouse in Africa and a key economic partner for the U.S. In four years as U.S. ambassador to South Africa, Donald Gips ’89 worked to increase investment and trade flows between the countries.

  • What are the realities of microfinance?

    New research is debunking myths about microfinance and showing how organizations can effectively address problems associated with poverty. Yale faculty Dean Karlan, Tony Sheldon, and Rodrigo Canales discuss the problems and the promise in the field of microfinance and the lessons for other kinds of social enterprise.

  • Can we end poverty?

    Esther Duflo, a development economist at MIT and director of the Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab, explains how our understanding of the economic lives of the poor has grown more complex in recent years. While Duflo doesn't see any silver bullet that will end poverty, she points to progress, in part from the use of randomized control trials to solve specific problems.

  • Can coffee help juice economic development?

    A nonprofit is teaching business skills to East African farmers in order to let them enter the high-profit global market for specialty coffee. The project showed enough promise to get $50 million in underwriting from the Gates Foundation, and now aims to reach 180,000 growers. David Browning ’99 of Technoserve describes how to educate small-hold farmers to plug into the global market.

  • Where does Africa fit in the globalization puzzle?

    The continent has often been singled out as an exception to the story of increasing globalization. Todd Moss, an Africa expert with the Center for Global Development, discusses Africa’s integration in world markets, why trade between African countries is so hard, and the role of outside powers such as China.

  • Has globalization failed in Nigeria?

    Oil pumped from the Niger Delta is loaded on supertankers and shipped into the global market, accounting for 3% of world production and generating substantial revenues for the Nigerian government. What has this connection to the world economy done for Nigeria?

  • Can capital overcome the past?

    A South African government program aimed at addressing deep historical inequities enabled a union-owned investment fund to build up enough capital to reach around the globe. The mostly black workers in the union now own a piece of a hotel chain in the Middle East and a clean-energy company in Pittsburgh. How much can be learned from this success?