Kenya : Accelerating and Sustaining Inclusive Growth
This report focuses on what needs to be done in the next five years to realize a significantly higher growth potential and sustain high growth in Kenya. The challenge before Kenya and the new government is to take the economy to the next phase of development. The report attempts to do this in two ways. First, it applies the insights from the recent empirical work and experience in other high growth countries to Kenya to propose a growth strategy. The strategy, so developed, will validate and likely help sharpen the broad thrust and direction of the ongoing reform efforts. Second, it drills down selectively into certain aspects of the growth strategy to generate a set of specific policy and institutional reforms. The net result is a reform agenda consisting of detailed policy actions that are expected to add up to a well-articulated growth strategy. Apart from influencing government action, the report is also expected to influence thinking about growth in policy circles outside the government. In its analysis, the report draws upon the state-of-the-art thinking on the issues of growth, which is going through considerable rethinking among economists and practitioners. Among several departures from the conventional view, the new thinking shies away from providing prepackaged answers to an economy's problems and emphasizes country-specific analysis instead. Similarly, the focus has shifted from identifying correlates of growth at a macroeconomic level (as in growth regressions), to identifying constraints to growth at a microeconomic level. This report reflects this shift in thinking and draws mainly upon analysis specific to Kenya (such as growth diagnostics and investment climate assessment) to arrive at conclusions relevant to policy choices. This report reinforces the findings of the Vision 2030 document in several areas, adds value in many others, and modifies some. Most significantly, this report agrees with the Vision that tourism, manufacturing, and service sectors based on Information and Communication Technology (ICT) are likely engines for growth. However, this report is much less emphatic than Vision 2030 about the sectors (identified winners and flagship projects) on which government should focus for delivering the aspired growth. The emphasis of the report is instead on generic economy-wide reforms aimed at reducing business costs and improving productivity.