Yes. I think we would see meaningfully different interventions. Not necessarily better in every dimension, but different in ways that matter. The cause prioritization would likely weight governance reform, regional economic integration, and technology transfer much more heavily than the current EA portfolio does. Your point about the African Union and East Asian industrial policy is not peripheral it is central. The countries that escaped structural poverty in the 20th century did not do so primarily through philanthropic intervention. They did so through deliberate state capacity-building, strategic trade policy, and the political will to demand technology transfer as a condition of foreign investment. EA, as currently constituted, largely brackets these levers because they are politically complex and hard to evaluate with RCTs. Here’s what I find genuinely interesting about your framing: it suggests that the composition of the EA community is not just a diversity issue it is a cause prioritization issue. The questions that feel most tractable from London or San Francisco may not be the questions with the highest leverage from Abidjan or Lagos. I don’t think the answer is to build a separate “African EA”. I think the answer is to create the conditions for this conversation to happen inside EA, with enough institutional weight that it actually shifts priorities rather than generating interesting forum threads. That’s something I’d like to work toward concretely. If others in this conversation are interested in thinking about what that could look like a working group, a collaborative post, a structured research agenda. I’m genuinely open to exploring it. Let’s not let this stop at a good exchange of ideas.
Also for trade & industrial policy purposes I find the Atlas Of Economic Complexity (https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/384) an interesting resource. I like the categorizing of countries into different economic strategies & the prioritized list of suggested new product opportunities for countries.
This is a genuinely useful resource, thank you. I’ve not encountered the Atlas before in agricultural value chain work in West Africa, but hadn’t fully appreciated its potential as a cause prioritization tool. What strikes me is that the Economic Complexity Index makes visible something development discourse tends to obscure: the structural distance between where a country’s productive capacity sits and where it needs to go. That distance is a map of where institutional intervention has the highest leverage exactly the kind of analysis EA cause prioritization should engage with, but rarely does. The product space framework also reframes the core question: not “what intervention produces the best RCT result” but “what structural moves make the most other moves possible.” That is a more powerful question, and one that connects directly to climate adaptation, food systems, and AI governance in African contexts. If there’s a real research agenda here applying complexity economics to EA cause prioritization in Sub-Saharan Africa, identifying high-leverage structural interventions that the current EA portfolio underweights because they resist standard impact metrics.
Yes. I think we would see meaningfully different interventions. Not necessarily better in every dimension, but different in ways that matter. The cause prioritization would likely weight governance reform, regional economic integration, and technology transfer much more heavily than the current EA portfolio does. Your point about the African Union and East Asian industrial policy is not peripheral it is central. The countries that escaped structural poverty in the 20th century did not do so primarily through philanthropic intervention. They did so through deliberate state capacity-building, strategic trade policy, and the political will to demand technology transfer as a condition of foreign investment. EA, as currently constituted, largely brackets these levers because they are politically complex and hard to evaluate with RCTs.
Here’s what I find genuinely interesting about your framing: it suggests that the composition of the EA community is not just a diversity issue it is a cause prioritization issue. The questions that feel most tractable from London or San Francisco may not be the questions with the highest leverage from Abidjan or Lagos.
I don’t think the answer is to build a separate “African EA”. I think the answer is to create the conditions for this conversation to happen inside EA, with enough institutional weight that it actually shifts priorities rather than generating interesting forum threads.
That’s something I’d like to work toward concretely. If others in this conversation are interested in thinking about what that could look like a working group, a collaborative post, a structured research agenda. I’m genuinely open to exploring it. Let’s not let this stop at a good exchange of ideas.
Agreed.
Also for trade & industrial policy purposes I find the Atlas Of Economic Complexity (https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/384) an interesting resource.
I like the categorizing of countries into different economic strategies & the prioritized list of suggested new product opportunities for countries.
This is a genuinely useful resource, thank you. I’ve not encountered the Atlas before in agricultural value chain work in West Africa, but hadn’t fully appreciated its potential as a cause prioritization tool.
What strikes me is that the Economic Complexity Index makes visible something development discourse tends to obscure: the structural distance between where a country’s productive capacity sits and where it needs to go. That distance is a map of where institutional intervention has the highest leverage exactly the kind of analysis EA cause prioritization should engage with, but rarely does.
The product space framework also reframes the core question: not “what intervention produces the best RCT result” but “what structural moves make the most other moves possible.” That is a more powerful question, and one that connects directly to climate adaptation, food systems, and AI governance in African contexts.
If there’s a real research agenda here applying complexity economics to EA cause prioritization in Sub-Saharan Africa, identifying high-leverage structural interventions that the current EA portfolio underweights because they resist standard impact metrics.