 Let me start by thanking UniWider for this great opportunity to come back to Helsinki and to make this presentation. It's usually a pleasure really to meet with my colleagues at Wider. This is a joint work with my colleague Guru Angadas from Hangyong University. It's a paper that is dealing with technology catch up in developing countries but this presentation will focus on Africa. So I will repeat what has been said this morning that we have some hope in Africa because Africa succeeded to make some progress during the last decade with a growth rate more than 5% since 2007 and many countries in Africa succeeded to increase their well-being and this is a big success for Africa. Is it time for celebration? As the African development said it's not really yet time for celebration because we have some contrast we have still some problem in Africa because even if opportunities are really great in Africa there is a lot of opportunity for progress for catching up for technology progress but still there is some problem like lack of good infrastructure without lack of production based diversification. In addition that poverty is still high in Africa and employment is also still high and thus we have some contrast in Africa of course we cannot really generalize. We have some successful story in Africa that I will talk about but we should really recognize the fact that even if the catching process already started the gap between the emerging economies or the engine of growth in South Africa is widening and we need to ask about why it is so. So we ask two main questions it's a provocative question and it's not really maybe the right question that we want to ask but we will ask it if why Africa is still lagging behind in terms of technological progress and we will try to find a way to answer this question by finding what kind of factors can help Africa to catch up. This is give you a kind of idea about what is going on in Africa you can see that some African countries succeeded to catch up they are moving ahead like Nigeria, Sierra Leone and so on but about 70% of African countries are still lagging behind. This means that some African countries succeeded to catch up. How sustainable is this catching up process if it's a question that we need to answer. So this is what we try to find why we have some reason to be optimistic but we need to find a way to answer the question about the countries which are lagging behind in terms of technological progress. So this is some results in terms of labor productivity this is comparison between emerging economy and emerging economy includes South Korea, India, China, Singapore, Thailand and we see that the gap in terms of labor productivity between emerging economy and our sub-Saharan Africa is increasing over time. It's not just about labor productivity even without total factor productivity we can see that the gap is increasing. So even if we had Africa made a lot of progress in terms of growth it seems that total factor productivity is increasing not enough to sustain growth at the long run and this is what we try to focus on. We have some result from the literature and as we can see that in terms of productivity even when we compare Africa to the global level we see that Africa is far behind the global level in terms of productivity there is some progress made over time since 2000 and if we compare for example the period 8995 to 2004 we see that now total factor productivity is contributing to growth it was contributing negatively in the 19th now it's positively but not enough that's meaning there is a lot there is some progress in Africa but maybe we need more effort to promote productivity growth in Africa. So when we refer to the literature we have different way to explain why a country or group of country can succeed to catch up we have an approach focusing on capital accumulation that means increasing investment can help country to catch up and so to progress in terms of technology and we have the new approaches focusing on institution condition knowledge human development social capital infrastructure. So we will focus on the last approach we don't really have data on social capital so we will focus on knowledge human development and institution conditions as a way to catch up and we will see if this condition really played a role in the catching process in the East Asia. So let me ask the data and we see what we get from the data so if we see in this chart we can see that there is a strong and positive correlation between total factor productivity and GDP per capita growth which means that at the long run the only way for Africa to grow is to improve total factor productivity in the same time we have a positive correlation between GDP per capita and knowledge index that means investing in knowledge or improving knowledge it's a way for Africa to catch up and to improve its productivity this is at the global level of course we the causality can run in both ways that's mean improving GDP or development can help really to improve knowledge in the country but we will control for that in our empirical analysis. So how the situation looks like in Africa we can see that this is some data from UNESCO Institute of Statistics about regional total investment or expansion research and development of the world and as you can see that Africa is not really investing enough in research and development only seven percent a seven billion and pushing power by it is invested in knowledge compared to the seven hundred eight seven point seven at the world and over time there is an increase but it's not really that much you can see that in two thousand twenty two seven billion it is now about seven billion so there is an increasing in investment in terms of research and development but it's not really compared to comparable to the global level so even if we compare Africa to the rest of the world that's mean the different region of the world you can see that steel there is a gap between the effort made at the global level and the effort made in Africa in terms of research and development while it is essential for Africa to catch up. In terms of business environment steel the business environment compared to the rest of the world is not really conductive for innovation and for invention as you can see the ranking of Africa is still behind the rest of the world so much more effort in terms of business environment is needed if Africa is to be to catch up with the rest of the world. It's already mentioned this morning that the business environment should be really improved to promote private sector and to promote innovation in Africa. In terms of human capital we still have the same problems that mean when we compare sub-saharan Africa to the rest of the world we should see that there is a steel lag and we can see that for the different pillar of human capital Africa is still lagging behind. So this is the main fact that we will try to focus on to try to answer the question how we can accelerate the catching process in Africa. So the same we have about knowledge once we have the same results there is nothing new about the fact that even about knowledge we have some lag to fill. So this is the conceptual framework that we will add that we should try to measure the technology gap between African economies and the southern engine of growth that's mean the emerging economies. This is the main fact that we will focus on to try to answer this question so we will include a variable measuring human capital level, a variable measuring level of knowledge and a variable measuring ICT and after that we will include in addition to all of that institutional variable we will focus on business environment in Africa as a way to improve productivity. So this is what we try of course we do not really ignore the external environment that is supposed to be a one way to for technology transfer in Africa. So this is the conceptual framework that we base on to specify our empirical model. So this is the model specification so we try to explain the technology gap between African economy and the rest of the world. We use the meta frontier approach and we measure the gap between the frontier in Africa and the best way of producing at the global level. We use some indicators explanatory variables like human capital, financial development liberalization and so on. We have three groups of countries we have the engine of growth, we include Brazil, South Korea, Singapore, Taiwan as I said. We include also South Africa which is an African country but it's somewhat an exception in the continent because South Africa is doing very well in terms of technology and in terms of economic progress. As a benchmark we have the first group we see the OCD countries and the second one will be and we have the African country that we will use as that we will focus on. Okay this is what we get in terms of analysis so the meta frontier helps us to measure two things the technology efficiency and the technology gap. As a technical efficiency measure that's the gap between the effective level of production and the potential level of production of the frontier. The technology gap measures the gap between the two frontiers that means the best way of production and the best or the current or the actual way of production. So as we can see in terms of efficiency there is no really the gap is narrowing between the emerging economy and Africa but when it comes to technology gap we see that the gap is widening. We just to remind you that the productivity is that's mean efficiency and technology gaps of the both component of productivity. So if you have an improvement of total capital of total factor productivity it can comes from wild technology efficiency or technology change. So if we see technology efficiency is improving in Africa some some progress in total factor productivity comes from the fact that Africa is coming more efficient in using the current technology. But the problem is that when it comes to the new technology it seems that the observation capacity of Africa in terms of new technology is still very limited and we want to to answer this question. This one just means that's when we're coming close to the best practices. So when it is declining that's when we are going far from the frontier. Yeah this is the ratio the technology ratio is one on the one over technology gap. Yeah exactly. Yeah it's a panel data that we use. Yeah okay this is our regression. So we start by trying to explain what can be the main reasons for a group of country to catch up. So we regress this technology gap ratio over a certain number of variables infrastructure and quality human development business environment trade and knowledge. We include other variable but this are the main the only variable that are significant. So infrastructure qualities in index which is includes for example electricity consumption includes roads telecommunication and so on and so it's not really vibrates in index. We use it the principle component to select the variable to be included in this index. The same for for human development we include education we include health expenditure we include the fertility rate and so on so it's in index that can measuring the human development in a country for the business environment is the same and for knowledge is it's about research and development investment about ICT exports and so on so we include all of them as a measure of knowledge. So as we can see that all the four factors are contributing significantly and positively and significantly to technology catch up and we can see that this is the main driver of catching our process in South Taring Korma and in the world as a general. Now when we try to measure if the gap in terms of a structure human development all these four countries is a kind of constraints for Africa to catch up with so here our benchmark is the emerging economy and we try to measure the gap in terms of infrastructure the gap in terms of human development and business environment and we see if they are constant and we we succeeded to find a negative and significant effect which means that the main factor behind the lag in terms of catching up in Africa are the lack of good infrastructure the lack of human development and the business environment is not really enough conductive for Africa to catch up. This is what we get as a result and we didn't succeed indeed to have a significant result in terms of knowledge gap maybe the measure that we use it for knowledge is not really the right one but we could not really show that the knowledge gap is the constraint for Africa to catch up. So as a conclusion so it's more general conclusion we can say that there is a lot of opportunity in Africa and there is a lot of hope that African economy can catch up in the near future but for that to happen we need really to make some structural transformation and this is already emphasized in this morning that the Africa need to make a structural transformation by strengthening the investment climate by improving the governance and by encouraging the private sector to contribute more to this transformation process. Of course the financial side is also a constraint for the Africa. This morning we talked about the effort by the African development to find the innovative way or innovative instrument to finance the transformation process but it may not really be enough for Africa to fuel this transformation so it seems that I think that the only way is to design a kind of domestic resource mobilization for Africa to to finance the transformation process. That's it.