The Facilitating State and Economic Development: The Role of the State in New Structural Economics

This paper explores the ideas of development and the role of the state in economic development and institutional change from the New Structural Economics perspective. We argue that economic structures – including the structure of technology and industry, and hard and soft infrastructure – are endogenous to the endowment structure, which is given at any specific time and changeable over time. We advocate a state to facilitate structural change by using industrial policy to overcome market failures in order to help industries with latent comparative advantages to become competitive in the market and the state should pragmatically prioritize the use of its limited resources and implementation capability to create enclaves with favourable infrastructure and institution to jump start a dynamic growth in a country beset with poor infrastructure and institution.