Structural Transformation in the Global South: Innovation and Enterprise as the New Engines of Development (Volume II)
Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: The assumptions that guided international development for seventy years no longer hold. Official development assistance fell by 23.1% in real terms in 2025, the largest drop on record, while low- and middle-income countries paid US$436 billion more in debt service than they received in new financing between 2022 and 2025. At the same time, automation is weakening the labor-intensive export ladder: a process-level model of garment factories shows that up to 58.4% of jobs could be displaced. This second volume argues that the new engines of structural transformation are indigenous innovation, digital public infrastructure (DPI), sovereign computing capacity and domestically anchored enterprise finance. It examines India's Unified Payments Interface and Open Network for Digital Commerce, and Brazil's Pix, which processed 79.6 billion transactions in 2025. It then reviews sovereign AI strategies across four archetypes, the 2025 recalibration of venture capital in Africa, Latin America, the Middle East and Southeast Asia, and the embedded-finance model of pay-as-you-go asset lending. Every statistic was checked against primary sources for this edition. The paper concludes with four policy priorities for governments, institutions and investors in the Global South.
Author: Mamun, Syed Muntasir
Institution: Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Dhaka
Language: English
Subfield: Economics and Econometrics
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W7225826478