Foreword
Low-income countries looking for development models have often turned to the experience of Asian countries, most recently China, whose growth in the past 30 years has been unparalleled in history. The story of China’s economic growth is inextricably linked to the use of “special economic zones” (SEZs). The transformation of Shenzhen, a small fishing village in the 1970s, into today’s city of almost 9 million is an illustration of the effectiveness of the SEZ model in the Chinese context. Many African countries continue to struggle to compete in industrial sectors and to integrate into the global value chains that generate the goods and services that are demanded by consumers around the globe. SEZs offer a potentially valuable tool to overcome some of the existing constraints to attracting investment and growing exports. But as this book explains clearly, governments that take a “build it and they will come” approach to SEZs do so at their peril. Indeed, the African experience with SEZs has not been anywhere near as successful as policy makers hoped it would be. What explains this? And to what degree might SEZs help contribute to improved competitiveness in African and other low-income economies? This book provides the first comprehensive assessment of Africa’s recent experience with developing SEZs, drawing lessons from in-depth xiii