Reforming the Investment Climate: Lessons for Practitioners

Most people agree that a good investment climate is essential for growth and poverty reduction. Less clear is how to achieve it. Drawing from more than 25 case studies, this book shows that reform often requires paying as much attention to dealing with the politics and institutional dimensions as to designing policy substance. While there is no single recipe or 'manual' for reform, the authors highlight three broad lessons. The first is to recognize and seize opportunities for reform. Crisis and new governments are important catalysts, but so is the competition generated by trade integration and new benchmarking information. The second is to invest early in the politics of reform. Public education can help gain wide acceptance for reform, while pilot programs can be valuable for demonstrating the benefits and feasibility of change. And the third is to treat implementation and monitoring as an integral part of the reform process and not merely as an afterthought. In the absence of public sector reform, reformers can draw on private sector change management techniques to revitalize institutions and put in place mechanisms to monitor and sustain reform. The book provides an emerging checklist for reformers and identifies areas for future work.