Guest blog by Woody Ang, LEG ’24
First, some context. I have spent the good part of the past decade supporting various countries in the developing world on their economic challenges. In many ways, the approach I have adopted has been one of attempting indigenous solutions which promoted pragmatic problem-solving anchored on pilot projects, rather than trying to solve complex policy problems. The commonalities across most of the developing world that I’ve had the privilege to have worked in are primarily around the lack of political will, a lack of resources, and an incredibly ambitious strategy that doesn’t ground on any form of tangible implementation. I now find myself in a location which theoretically does not suffer from a lack of political will nor does it have a resource mobilization issue similar to much of the developing world, yet I find many practical ideas that will still apply.
There are a number of key takeaways from this course:
- I take away from this course a greater appreciation of the work I used to do, but now reinforced with some clear concepts such as PDIA – and gaining a greater appreciation of the need to go deeper in a specific problem in an iterative manner (be it via fishbone diagrams or other tools).
- I also took away the absolute need for Governments to prioritize as many of the example success stories showed a ‘whole of government’ approach towards high potential catalytic investments.
- I have gained much greater conviction to avoid the fallacy of ‘best practice’, a common ‘easy way out’ for decision-makers which should be challenged and to take a proper stab at ‘localizing’ the problem.
- I found it very enlightening to look at the ‘knowhow’ aspect of knowledge and realized the fallacy so many countries have approached the problem by closing themselves up economically via nationalistic protectionist policies. This is even more apparent given I’m a minority in my own home country that practices affirmative action policies.
- On that note, I also have gained a much greater appreciation of the need for inclusive development, thanks to the group discussions I’ve had with my fellow group members. We’ve had many healthy debates, and I’ve been glad to be been proven wrong on multiple occasions.
- I am also greatly appreciative of the amount of available information the Growth Lab has put into the Atlas of Economic Complexity, Metroverse and the Greenplexity platforms – all of which provide a pragmatic framework of what an economy should be looking at as more feasible, strategic bets, versus being highly reactive.
My growth challenge was to develop and attract investments into the agriculture and food sector as strategic bets in economic diversification, but where products are not in the high complexity space, yet there is a desire to accelerate growth in the sector from a self-sufficiency perspective and to potentially export technologies in the long run. When I first commenced this course, I was somewhat crestfallen as the atlas implied that we were looking at the wrong strategic bet.
However, as the course progressed, I’ve learned to appreciate that there are still ways to use PDIA to shift the priorities to areas within the industry that can make a more definitive impact, particularly in the areas of technology that can be made more applicable across the industry (e.g. water saving technologies, soil amendment technologies, novel feeds etc.). I intend to attempt to target a specific company that provides such a technology and determine the best way to focus attention on what it will take to bring such a company into the region with tailored enablers and also leverage the current fiscal incentives KSA already offers.
Almost immediately applicable from the course is how I intend to approach regulatory improvements. It has always been a tendency to rely only on best practice. I have already commenced the process of creating a test pilot application on the existing process and having a multi-stakeholder committee to learn from the pilot applications of new gene technologies in agriculture. I hope to discover where we can improve the process through iterative learning from the application.
All said and done, I truly feel I’ve benefitted greatly from this course and keenly look forward to taking up further modules from HKS’s Economic Development track. My sincere thanks to Prof Hausmann, Prof Andrews, and the entire LEG team for the learnings and interactivity this virtual course has provided!
This is a blog series written by the alumni of the Leading Economic Growth Executive Education Program at the Harvard Kennedy School. 47 Participants successfully completed this 10-week online course in December 2024. These are their learning journey stories.