IDR 2004: Industrialization, Environment and the Millennium Development Goals in Sub-Saharan Africa

The reports also aim to provide guidance to policy makers and assist both public and private stakeholders to formulate, implement and monitor national strategies for effective poverty reduction through sustained productivity enhancement. While doing this, the series not only takes stock of past development experiences, but also analyzes policy options in the light of country-specific conditions prevailing under the current international norms and rules.

The first report, IDR 2002 / 2003 focused on the role of learning and innovation in industrial development. The Industrial Development Scoreboard was introduced with this report as part of the effort to provide policy makers with a tool to assess the state of world industry and benchmark their national industrial performance.

The Industrial Development Report 2004, Industrialization, Environment and the Millennium Development Goals in Sub-Saharan Africa, while continuing and updating industrial performance benchmarking, addresses the challenges faced by Sub-Saharan African countries, a mandated priority area for UNIDO, in furthering their efforts towards poverty reduction. Hence it features a special focus on the dynamic processes of productivity growth, wealth creation and social advance in Sub-Saharan Africa in the context of the internationally agreed development goals and targets of the Millennium Declaration and the national poverty reduction strategies. 

The first part of the report pinpoints the opportunities and policy options available for the Sub-Saharan African countries to reduce poverty through structural change, productivity growth and diversification, and by building up the institutional and social capabilities essential to overcome adverse initial conditions. Examining the ways in which greater private sector participation, strengthened through the provision of public goods, can enhance poverty reduction efforts, the report also outlines forward-looking policy approaches to industrial development that take advantage of environmentally sound and advanced technologies. The report argues the improvements that MDGs envisage in health, education gender, environment and infrastructure are essential if productive sectors are to grow, create employment and result in sustained development. It also argues that complementary to the efforts to offset the adverse conditions via the MDGs, a number of external and domestic policy interventions need to complement and reinforce the relationship between MDGs, poverty reduction and sustained growth. Above all, this requires the build up of social and technological capabilities. The Report calls on the international community to help SSA countries meet their capability-building needs, including those relating to trade.

The second part features the Industrial Development Scoreboard, which benchmarks a set of industrial performance and capability indicators, for both the core group of countries first studied in IDR 2002/2003 and an enlarged set of countries including additional transition and Sub-Saharan African countries between the years 1980 and 2000. The Scoreboard provides a global overview of industrial competitiveness in all its diversity, and assesses the main factors affecting it. online order form for hard copy version