Driving Digital Transformation: Lessons from Seven Developing Countries

Benno Ndulu · Elizabeth Stuart · Stefan Dercon · Peter Knaack

mar 2023 · Oxford University Press

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This is an open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence. It is free to read at Oxford Scholarship Online and offered as a free PDF download from OUP and selected open access locations. In one country, the prime minister pushes for the liberalization of digital finance as a central pillar of the country's national strategy, while the central bank almost makes it a criminal offence. In another, the digital minister tries to scupper the very process to support digital transformation that the president has asked them to co-lead. This book gives a ringside seat on seven developing countries' tumultuous early steps on the path to a reform of the economy and the government using technology. Written by a group of academics and practitioners from Oxford at the heart of the process, but foregrounding the voices of the policymakers and participants, this book documents and critically assesses efforts to assist a set of governments to kick-start digital transformation. In doing so, it offers lessons for policymakers in other countries who want to pursue similar efforts. Beyond that, however, it is also an exposition of the process of policymaking more generally in the 2020s, and offers broader insight into how outsiders can play a sensible role in other reform processes in developing and emerging countries.

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Benno Ndulu served as Governor of the Central Bank of Tanzania from 2008 to 2018. Following his PhD degree in economics from Northwestern University, Ndulu taught economics at the University of Dar es Salaam, before joining the World Bank as a lead economist. He published and taught widely on growth, regional integration, adjustment, governance, trade, and investments. Most recently, he served as Academic Co-director of the Pathways for Prosperity Commission as a Visiting Associate of Oxford University's Blavatnik School of Government. He passed away in February 2021. Elizabeth Stuart is a development practitioner. Before leading the Pathways to Prosperity Commission on Inclusive Development and its successor research and policy centre at Oxford University's Blavatnik School of Government, she has been variously Director of Policy and Research at Save the Children UK; Director of the Growth, Poverty and Inequality programme at the Overseas Development Institute; and Head of Oxfam International's Washington Office. Stefan Dercon is Professor of Economic Policy at the Blavatnik School of Government and the Economics Department, and a Fellow of Jesus College. He is also Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economies. He combines his academic career with work as a policy advisor, providing strategic economic and development advice. Between 2011 and 2017, he was Chief Economist of the Department of International Development (DFID), and he has served as Academic Co-director of the Pathways for Prosperity Commission. Since 2020, he has been the Development Policy Advisor to successive Foreign Secretaries at the UK's Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office. Peter Knaack is an Adjunct Professor at the School of International Service, American University. He is also a Senior Research Associate at the Global Economic Governance Programme at the University of Oxford, Research Associate at the Centre for Sustainable Finance at SOAS, University of London, and Associate at the Council on Economic Policies, a Swiss think tank. His research explores global financial governance, with a focus on inclusive green finance, the political economy of global banking regulation, China's role in global financial governance, and the growing tension between nation-states and transgovernmental networks over the authority to govern cross-border economic activity.