Blog: Governance and Institutions

Interview with John Sutton

Photo from the Office of the Prime Minister, Ethiopia, from Flickr

Originally posted on July 24, 2017

VoxDev reproduced an interview with John Sutton of LSE which had been originally published in LSE's Economics Annual Review 2015-2016.

In the review, Sutton talks about his experience advising the Ethiopian government's investment agency.

He notes that several African countries have been growing rapidly over the past decade. If they could continue the pace, they could achieve middle-income status within another decade.

But how can they keep up that growth?

One necessary condition he posits is an expansion of industry and manufacturing, which can't be done without increasing foreign direct investment (FDI), which can't be done without attracting those FDIs. Here's where the investment agencies came in.

Ethiopia saw an expansion of the firms its investment agency has dealt with from 100 or so several years ago to over 400 today. Sutton suggests that what mattered was getting the right person in the right place at the right time. A key part of the CDE's mission is facilitating just that type of event.