 I'm actually cheating because I have 10 minutes. I'm taking two minutes now because I thought I might explain to you Why we're here and hopefully why you're here And then take about eight minutes at the end to talk a little bit about what we think are some of the policy implications of the work that we've done This project is the story of one little conversation and how it grew and in fact it was a conversation I think over a beer probably at an AERC meeting about four years ago between Fintarp Louis Kasekende who at that time was the chief economist of the African Development Bank and and I In which we sort of looked at each other and said, you know one thing that's a very big puzzle Is that there's no industry in Africa and we wonder why that would be the case and whether it's important And what could be done about it and from that conversation we began a three-party Collaborative research project for the Brookings Institution. It was a complete innovation the first really of its kind In which the African Bank you and you wider and the Brookings Institution came together to sponsor a multi-country Multitopic research program that at the end of the day extended for about three and a half years In the course of that work We discovered that what we thought was an interesting puzzle was to some extent to us really a problem If we go back 30 years to the founding of you and you wider The percentage of industry in Africa was about 12% of GDP Today, it's about 10% of GDP. That's about the level that it was at the end of the 1970s In a period of time in the last 30 years in which there's been a fundamental change in the location of global Manufacturing moving from the north to developing countries and as we heard earlier today We're about 45% of manufacturing value that is now produced in the developing world Africa simply has failed to industrialize And we thought that was important because it fits into the theme of structural transformation that we've heard a great deal about in the last Several sessions of this conference The structural transformation that's taking place in Africa today is a movement of people off the farm and into services Not into industry The reason why that's a bit worrisome is that the average productivity of worker and services is about twice that in agriculture The average productivity of a person Existing industry in Africa is about six times. So there's a large productivity differential that's being given up by a failure to have a more active industrialization across the continent To try to understand why there's so little industry in Africa and what to do about it We launched an 11 country comparative research project All of the country teams were from countries involved nine or sub-Saharan African countries We have a number of co-authors of that study here in the room with us today Two were from East Asia Vietnam and Cambodia and Tunisia in North Africa We did the research at three levels country case studies to look at policies initial conditions institutions econometric studies to look at some topics the three of which you'll hear today and Qualitative studies where we did something that's somewhat unusual for economists these days though not so much 30 years ago Actually went out and talked to firms which was Seemed a bit odd to many of our colleagues But trying to put those three together. We think we now have a story We think we understand better why Africa failed to industrialize over the last 30 years And we think we know something about what to do about it So that's the topic of the conversation today and we'll start now with some of the results that we've gotten from the research