Investment and Growth

The Investment and Growth programme provides an independent and critical voice on economic growth issues in both developing and developed countries.

Using innovative research and communications techniques and empirical testing of relevant economic and other theories, it seeks to inform developing country policy makers (including economic policy makers and trade negotiators), donors, researchers and the development community on what drives growth and investment and how the public sector or donors can actively support growth.

Current work has been dominated by the global financial crisis and the Programme leads an ODI wide crisis task force.

What we work on

Economic growth is crucial for delivering the economic freedoms and capabilities for sustained human development. But achieving and sustaining growth is not easy – researchers know very little about the causes of growth or what has caused growth after a growth episode has been observed.

An overriding concern for all the work is whether developing country governments can have a tailored progressive response to new policy issues or whether they should withdraw from active involvement and promote a neutral set of established development policies and rules, and if so what either of these might look like under which type of circumstances.

About the programme

Growth has moved up the development agenda and ODI has made an impact on this agenda. We have:

• Written key papers on growth for the Commission for Africa in 2005;
• Guided the donor community through paying more attention to the supply side and productive sectors in ODI’s pioneering research on Aid for Trade;
• Provided platforms for business, NGO and academic speakers on growth issues;
• Helped public sector officials appreciate the importance of services in the economy, (e.g. for small economies); and
• Kick-started innovative research on state-business relations and economic growth.