About
The Threats to Growth Lab
Applied research and policy advice to help developing countries identify, avoid, and mitigate the threats that derail sustained economic growth.
The Problem
Economic growth is the most powerful force for poverty reduction and human development. When sustained over decades, even modest per capita growth transforms living standards, expands opportunity, and builds the fiscal capacity that states need to serve their citizens. But growth is fragile.
For every Botswana or South Korea that has sustained rapid growth over a generation, there are far more countries whose growth has stalled, reversed, or never materialised in the first place. The consequences are measured in lost decades — countries like Zambia, Venezuela, and Mozambique have experienced growth collapses or prolonged stagnation that, had they been avoided, would have left millions of people dramatically better off.
What Current Research Misses
Existing research on growth in developing countries tends to fall into three categories: macroeconomic growth theory (which operates at high levels of abstraction), country-specific case studies (rich but idiosyncratic), and cross-country growth regressions (which identify correlations but struggle with causal identification and policy relevance).
None of these traditions is well suited to helping policymakers in low- and middle-income countries recognise and respond to concrete growth threats as they emerge. The presource curse — the damage that begins at the moment of resource discovery, not production — is a case in point: it remains poorly documented and largely absent from policy advice.
The Lab's Approach
The Lab is distinguished by four commitments:
Threat-focused framing
Rather than asking what drives growth, the Lab asks: what specific, identifiable threats derail it?
Counterfactual rigour
Synthetic growth paths quantify what countries lost — making the stakes concrete, not abstract.
Just-in-time relevance
When a country faces a critical juncture, evidence and policy options delivered quickly from a full case archive.
Visualization-first
Interactive data tools are a core output, not a supplement. Research communicated to non-specialist audiences.
Initial Research Agenda
The Lab's first year focuses on establishing credibility through a small number of high-quality outputs:
- → Anchor empirical project: Synthetic growth paths for resource discoverers, using synthetic control methods to construct counterfactual GDP per capita trajectories for Ghana, Mozambique, Tanzania, Uganda, and Guyana.
- → The Presource Curse in Action: Empirical investigation of fiscal and governance indicators in countries between discovery announcement and first production.
- → Country case study repository: Initial entries covering Ghana, Mozambique, Senegal, Zambia, and Venezuela — plus Malawi as a live "risk on the horizon" case.
- → Policy brief series: Beginning with the presource curse explainer and an early-warning checklist for resource-rich LICs.
Get in Touch
The Lab is at an early stage and actively seeking funding partners, advisory board members, affiliated researchers, and institutional partners. If you are working on adjacent questions, facing a growth threat directly, or want to support the initiative, please reach out.
Contact via jamescust.com →