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Developing countries made considerable gains during the first decade of the 21st century. Their economies grew at unprecedented rates, resulting in large reduction in extreme poverty and a significant expansion of the middle class. But more recently that progress has slowed with an economic environment of lackluster global trade, not enough jobs coupled with skills mismatches, continued globalization and technological change, greater income inequality, unprecedented population aging in richer countries, and youth bulges in the poorer ones. This essay examines how seven key countries fared from 1990-2010 in their development quest. The sample includes Brazil, India, Vietnam and four African countries-Botswana, Ghana, Nigeria, and Zambia-all of which experienced rapid growth in recent years, but for different reasons. The patterns of growth are analyzed in each of these countries using a unifying framework that draws a distinction between the "structural transformation" and "fundamentals" challenges in growth. Out of the seven countries, the traditional path to rapid growth of export oriented industrialization only played a significant role in Vietnam.

Productivity Growth --- Structural Change

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The economic thinking around the role of agriculture for development has evolved since the 1950s. Over the past decades, the agriculture sector has been rediscovered as a sector with great potential for triggering growth, reducing poverty and inequality, providing food security, and delivering environmental services. This paper contributes to the literature on the determinants of agricultural development by investigating the role played by laws and regulations. First, the paper proposes new measures of regulatory quality and regulatory efficiency in agriculture. Second, the paper employs cross-section data to test the relationship of the proposed measures with agricultural performance. The results indicate that agricultural productivity is on average higher where transaction costs imposed by regulations are lower and where countries adhere to more regulatory good practices. This relationship is stronger when low transaction costs and regulatory good practices are combined.

Agribusiness --- Business Regulations --- Legal Institutions --- Structural Change

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Agricultural policies --- Plant protection --- technological changes --- Structural change --- Senegal.

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Agroindustrial sector --- Economic development --- socioeconomic development --- Agricultural development --- Structural change --- Sahel

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Empirical evidence indicates that in many developing regions, the extreme poor in more marginal land areas form a "residual" pool of rural labor. Structural transformation in such developing economies depends crucially on labor and land use decisions of these most-vulnerable populations located on abundant but marginal agricultural land. Although the modern sector may be the source of dynamic growth through learning-by-doing and knowledge spillovers, patterns of labor, land and other natural resources use in the rural economy matter in the overall dynamics of structural change. The concentration of the rural poor on marginal lands is essentially a barometer of economy-wide development. As long as there are abundant marginal lands for cultivation, they serve to absorb rural migrants, increased population, and displaced unskilled labor from elsewhere in the economy. Moreover, the economy is vulnerable to the "Dutch disease" effects of a booming primary products sector. As a consequence, productivity increases and expansion in the commercial primary production sector will cause manufacturing employment and output to contract, until complete specialization occurs. Avoiding such an outcome and combating the inherent dualism of the economy requires both targeted polices for the modern sector and traditional agriculture on marginal lands.

Dualism --- Energy --- Environment --- Marginal lands --- Primary products --- Rural poverty --- Structural change