Resource information
This note introduces an evolutionary
approach to economic and governance reform. It lays out two
especially prevalent trajectories that differ starkly from
one another in how they prioritize and sequence economic
growth, state building, and the development of civil society
and political institutions. The first trajectory focuses
initially on investments in state capacity. The second
initially prioritizes smaller, more catalytic entry points
and addresses specific capacity and institutional
constraints as and when they become binding. Over the longer
term, both trajectories endogenously generate incentives to
strengthen institutions that underpin economic competition
and political accountability. But over the short to medium
term, the strengths of one trajectory are mirrored as the
weakness of the other. For many low-income countries, the
combination of rapid growth plus a seeming excess of either
order or chaos may thus be in the (medium-term) nature of
things, rather than an aberration that requires fixing.
