Keynote Address MICHAEL SPENCE
Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It is an honor for me to be here at this conference. I first have to apologize for my appearance. My bag and I parted company some time yesterday. There is a saying that clothes make the man. If that is true, then my name is Roberto Zagha—at least for half of my body, the better-dressed half. What I would like to do today is to take a relatively high-speed tour of the report of the Commission on Growth and Development entitled The Growth Report: Strategies for Sustained Growth and Inclusive Development (CGD 2008). We have with us today the vice chairman, Danny Leipziger; the secretary, Roberto Zagha; and Trevor Manuel, South Africa’s minister of finance and an important member of the commission. We have been working for just over two years. The commission members are, you will note, predominantly political or policy people, very senior, and very experienced in developing countries. There are a couple of exceptions. I am one, and Robert Solow is another. But the members’ experience was intended to be an important part of the work of the commission. We focused on what we called inclusive sustained high growth. We asked two things. How does sustained high growth work; that is, what are the fundamental dynamics? What are the policies, investments, and political underpinnings that enable this kind of growth? And we defined “sustained” to mean “over several decades.” We used a benchmark of 25 years or more, and we arbitrarily picked a 7 percent growth because output or income doubles every 10 years at that rate. I will talk more about the important concept of inclusiveness later. Our primary target audience is basically political and policy leaders in developing countries. Our hope when we started this process was that we would be able to provide some useful insights and perhaps a framework that would help in setting policy priorities and developing growth strategies in the specific country context. Now,
Michael Spence is a senior fellow at the Hoover Institution and is the Philip Knight Professor Emeritus at Stanford University, both in Stanford, CA. In 2001, he was awarded the Nobel prize for economics. He is currently chairman of the Commission on Growth and Development. Annual World Bank Conference on Development Economics 2009, Global © 2010 The International Bank for Reconstruction and Development / The World Bank
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