Vision to Reality: The Reut Blog

A World Bank paper cited by the Growth Report lends some credence to the Reut Institute’s claim that a leapfrog (from poor to middle-income) requires a central brain.

The key structural findings about these teams:

• Autonomous, apolitical groups of technocrats with the ear of effective political leadership were present at the beginning of development for Botswana, Cape Verde, Malaysia, Mauritius, and Taiwan.
• Reform Teams are useful for small, simple agrarian economies looking to industrialize. It is unclear whether the same structure is useful for large countries (like India or China) or industrialized countries with highly diversified economies (like Israel).

Content wise:

• All reform teams settled on export led growth to spur industrialization.
• Policy recommendations were bound to a strict social contract: economic development in return for infrastructure, health, and education.

How relevant is the Reform Team/Central Brain concept for a middle-income country like Israel seeking to make it to rich-country status?