Diagnose why economies stall — and how to move them out of the Middle Income Trap (MIT)

If you've sat in a finance ministry briefing room, a multilateral working group, or a board strategy session and felt the frustration of watching technically sound analysis fail to shift the conversation — you already understand part of the middle-income trap problem. Not the economics of it, which you likely know well. The deeper problem: that the frameworks most of us reach for in those rooms were built to describe the trap, not to explain why it persists with such ferocity against reform effort after reform effort.

I designed this seminar because I kept encountering the same gap in practitioner analysis. The growth-accounting narrative — productivity slowdown, structural transformation incomplete, comparative advantage eroding — is accurate as far as it goes. But it systematically underweights the institutional architecture that locks stagnation in place and the behavioural mechanics that make reform politically radioactive even when the technical case is overwhelming. A diagnostic that cannot explain why reform fails is only half a diagnostic.

What I've tried to build here is the seminar I wished existed when I was first working through these questions seriously. It treats New Institutional Economics not as background colour but as a primary analytical tool — North's framework on property rights and transaction costs, rule-of-law deficits, elite capture, institutional complementarities. It layers in behavioural economics not as a fashionable addendum but as a genuine explanatory mechanism: loss aversion at the firm level, status quo bias inside regulatory bureaucracies, the narrative economics of belief traps that sustain bad equilibria long after the empirical ground has shifted. And it subjects the major policy prescriptions — industrial policy, FDI liberalisation, human-capital investment — to the comparative case evidence from East Asia, Latin America, and Sub-Saharan Africa with the critical discipline those records actually deserve.

The capstone is where the seminar earns its keep. Building a reform sequencing roadmap that maps stakeholder power, accounts for political-economy constraints and behavioural barriers, and identifies crisis windows is the analytical task that separates credible policy advice from well-intentioned wishful thinking. The executive simulation that follows is calibrated to the audiences where these arguments live or die: boards, finance ministries, multilateral institutions. The goal is that you leave able to present evidence-based recommendations on trap risk and reform strategy with the authority that comes from having stress-tested the argument, not just assembled it.

This is a working seminar for people who are already serious about this domain. If you're looking for an introduction to development economics, this isn't the right room. But if you're a senior economist, policy advisor, development-finance professional, central banker, or emerging-market strategist who wants frameworks precise enough to hold up under expert scrutiny — and who is willing to do the analytical work — then I think what's in here will genuinely sharpen how you see and operate in these economies. I look forward to working through these questions with you.