DAI is delighted to announce the publication of Grounds for Growth: Enhancing the Competitiveness Impacts of Business Environment Reform, the latest issue in its Developing Alternatives series.

Edited by DAI’s structural reform advisor, Ulrich Ernst, Grounds for Growth explores the relationship between regulatory reform and competitiveness in developing countries, offering practical perspectives on recent efforts to nurture economic growth in such countries by improving the business environment.

“We do not have all the answers,” concedes Ernst in his introduction, “but we are closer to targeting regulatory reform to support economic dynamism and market responsiveness, without sacrificing human concerns in terms of health, safety, and the environment.”

DAI’s Bryanna Millis and Dan Charette lead off the nine articles in the journal with a discussion of “CIBER” (Competitiveness Impacts of Business Environment Reform), a tool DAI developed for the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID) Office of Microenterprise Development.

Where Millis and Charette present case studies from Brazil, Serbia, and Ethiopia, Pantjar Simatupang and David Anderson focus on Indonesia, showing how USAID’s Agribusiness Market and Support Activity has used “Regional Agribusiness Competitiveness Alliances,” or RACAs, to lead public-private dialogue on agricultural development, programs, and policies.

The next three articles all take the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) as the proving ground for their analysis:

DAI’s Denis Gallagher, who manages the regulatory reform component of USAID’s Technical Assistance for Policy Reform II project in Egypt, draws on experience in Palestine, Eastern Europe, and Egypt to identify the ingredients needed to support successful public-private coalitions for regulatory change;

Lara Goldmark, Chief of Party on the Improving the Business Climate in Morocco program, discusses how her program has used a regional (that is, subnational) version of the World Bank’s Doing Business indicator to heighten scrutiny of the business environment across Morocco and thereby spur national reform; and

Ulrich Ernst looks at the MENA region as a whole, analyzing Doing Business and Global Competitiveness Report data to explore the relationship between the region’s business environment and its competitiveness profile.

In “Vietnam’s Business Environment: Complying with Regulations Abroad and Competing at Home,” DAI’s Helle Weeke and Steve Parker join with University of California Professor Edmund Malesky to shed light on Vietnam’s success in reforming its business environment, an effort driven in large part by the need to meet the requirements of trade agreements and accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO).

Regulatory transparency is a crucial aspect of global competitiveness. The WTO, for example, imposes minimum standards on its members, and bilateral free trade agreements often impose even stricter standards. Two contributors to Grounds for Growth explore the path to regulatory transparency: Jeffrey Lubbers of American University, an authority on administrative law, reviews recent developments in rulemaking in the United States, while Delia Rodrigo of the World Bank summarizes trends in other Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development countries, as well as in developing economies.

Finally, tax administration expert Arturo Jacobs and DAI’s Mark Gallagher—Chief of Party for USAID’s Worldwide Fiscal Reform and Economic Governance program—catalogue the more fruitful tax administration reforms implemented in recent years, drawing on firsthand experience in more than a dozen countries, from El Salvador and Georgia to Jordan and Pakistan.

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