Healing the economic and social wounds inflicted by the COVID-19 pandemic will take time, but the long road to recovery presents a unique opportunity to build back better. To catalyze change and succeed in the post-pandemic era, economic development policy and practice must see the crisis as an opportunity to rethink and redesign regional economic systems. This will involve creating a shared understanding of – and policies to address – the differential impacts of the pandemic across occupations, industries, and socioeconomic groups. Rethinking how existing economic development tools, frameworks, and practices can be optimized has never been more compelling. Special attention must be given to interventions capable of accelerating desirable trends that will shape the next normal in our contemporary discussions on the COVID-19 pandemic. This book explores the challenges and opportunities heralded by the virus in the broadest sense and presents case studies on equitable and inclusive economic recoveries. Regional Economic Systems after COVID-19 offers actionable insights for regional policymakers, business leaders, investment and trade promotion agencies, site selectors, students, scholars, researchers, and organizations involved in tourism, foreign direct investment, and economic development.

Society wants the supply of public services like healthcare, education, security, and infrastructure to be flexible, innovative, and efficient. However, the barriers created by bureaucracies often stifle innovation. Amid the current wave of digital transformation, new innovations that can help governments fulfil their social contracts are increasingly emerging. While the role of the state in creating incentives and reducing transaction costs is clear, a nuanced understanding of contemporary social policy requires a firm grasp of the role of business. The notion of the knowledge economy lies at the heart of contemporary economic growth narratives. Not only has it shifted attention from the industry-government dyad to the "Triple Helix" of university-industry-government interactions, but it has also increased the attention given to the latter, since the 1990s, as a reliable analytical framework for innovation policy and practice. While globalization has intensified technology diffusion globally, leading to increased productivity in emerging and less developed economies, the extent of income convergence predicted by theory has not been realized. This is due, partly, to changes in the patterns and processes of capital accumulation during the post-World War II economic boom, and the concomitant highly dynamic nature of the capitalist mode of production. A major characterization of the neoclassical production function is a standard assumption of profit maximization by firms. Under this framework, changes in a firm's revenue are linked to changes in the costs of capital and labor, with implications for competition, efficiency, and transparency. The past few decades have heralded a decline in labor's share of income, due to the prevailing highly capital-intensive multinational system of production. In addition to the concentration of capital ownership, this mode of wealth creation generates varying returns to different categories of labor, with workers at the top of the income distribution reaping disproportionately large rewards over time. The innovation discourse has transitioned from its purely scientific and technical focus to include digital opportunities and the evolution of new business models. Economic diversification is often associated with higher levels of productivity because structural transformation leads to factor reallocation within and between sectors. However, due to various institutional and structural economic constraints such as large informal sectors, limited access to technology, and poor infrastructure, this is far from the case in many countries in the Global South. Based on original research, theoretical perspectives, best practices, and lessons from multiple jurisdictions, this book provides insight into how public-private partnerships (P3s) can help transform a wide range of policy initiatives by creating win-win outcomes in traditionally mutually exclusive competitive markets and public sector operations. From efficiency and redistribution to policy diffusion and innovation to transaction costs and corporate innovation in the new economy, the book sheds light on the efficacy of P3s as a useful tool in addressing important public policy challenges related to health innovation, traditional education under disruptive technologies, climate change and the energy transition, the extractives sector, infrastructure, digital trade facilitation, and many more. This book examines what we know and do not know about the role of P3s in innovating policy; it focuses on a broad range of reforms capable of driving competitiveness and economic growth. All in the global context.

With both domestic and external financing expected to dry up in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, this book argues that there is a need for fresh ideas and new strategies for achieving sustainable development in Africa. In addition to triggering the most severe recession in nearly a century, the COVID-19 pandemic has disrupted global value chains, causing unprecedented damage to healthcare systems, economies, and well-being, hitting the world's most vulnerable people the hardest. Even before the pandemic, Africa was suffering from the effects of low commodity prices, sluggish GDP growth, high debt levels, low levels of domestic savings, and weak private capital inflows. This book argues that now, as the continent emerges from the current crisis, it will be important to reconfigure current financing sources under a forward-looking framework that incorporates other non-traditional financing tools and mechanisms such as public-private partnerships, sovereign wealth funds, gender lens investing, new growth drivers, and emerging and disruptive technologies. Finally, the book concludes by adopting a sectoral approach and examining the real economy impacts of new growth drivers such as agriculture value chains, industrialization, tourism, and the blue economy. Drawing on a range of original research as well as insights from practice, this book will be a useful guide for Global Development and African Studies researchers, as well as for policy makers, investors, finance specialists, and global business practitioners and entrepreneurs.

A core political economy issue in the growth literature is how to structure the relationship between the public and private sectors to ensure optimal outcomes. While conventional arguments on the ability of the private sector to intrinsically generate efficiency gains remain valid, governments' traditional role of providing an enabling environment to foster private risk taking for capital accumulation is no less important. African Policy Innovation and the Political Economy of Public-Private Policy Partnerships borrows from contemporary theories of policy change and raises some fundamental questions about the political economy of development in Africa. This book examines the current knowledge and research about the role of public-private policy partnerships in the policy innovation discourse. It contributes a comprehensive, cutting-edge analysis vis-a-vis the appropriateness of contemporary policy devices and paradigms, the compatibility of individualistic analytical frameworks with the African philosophy of Ubuntu, the debate on the rise of neoliberalism versus Africa's traditions and values, and the implications of path dependence for the African Renaissance. From local communities and NGOs to African governments and international development agencies, the author advances a multi-stakeholder development policy and programming framework which recognizes Africa's vastly heterogenous economies and societies. Covering topics such as policy diffusion, demographic shifts, inequality, rentier capitalism, industrial transformation, development finance innovations, venture capital ecosystems, tax policy and supply-side economics, ocean finance, the global minimum tax debate, and higher education under disruptive technologies, this premier reference source is an excellent resource for government officials, policymakers, entrepreneurs, business leaders, libraries, students and educators of higher education, researchers, and academicians.