Building Capabilities for Productive Development

Book excerpt: Productive development policies (PDPs) are notoriously hard. They involve a daunting level of technical detail, require public-private collaboration, are in constant danger of capture, and demand time consistency hard to achieve in a politically volatile region. Nevertheless, the potential of PDPs to revitalize the region’s economic performance and spur productivity growth cannot be ignored. This book takes an in-depth look at 17 cases involving productive development agencies from Argentina, Brazil, Costa Rica and Uruguay, identifying key features of institutional design and agency-level practices that make success more likely in this difficult policy arena. Careful study of these experiences might help successful productive development policies gain currency across the region. The cases in this book should not be seen as the exceptions that prove the rule of lackluster PDP performance, but rather as examples that demonstrate the rule can be broken.