Knowledge-based Economies (KBE)

Developing economies were seen in terms of dual economies  where geographically defined sub-national regions connected with the developed market economies, while the remainder languished in pre-capitalist forms.  However the last two decades of the twentieth century witnessed the accelerated progress of “globalization” enabled by lower-cost and more efficient transportation services and coordination made possible by enhanced telecom services, as well as the political, economic and cultural dynamics of the post-Cold-War world.   This opened up the possibilities for global value chains that did not stop at the borders of export processing zones or coastal, connected regions of developing economies. In many discussions, efficiency is identified as a key factor.  However it is necessary to give equal weight to inclusion, in the form of bringing more people into the global value chains.  Currently, many people participate in agriculture.  Those who participate in global value chains tend to be more prosperous than those who are limited to local value chains.  Bringing more people into global value chains, does not refer in any way to increasing the number of people engaged in agriculture (increased productivity would mean that less people engage in purely agricultural traditional livelihoods); rather about global value chains that include more SMEs.