From Rent-seeking to Profit-creation: Private Sector Development and Economic Turnaround in Fragile States

Abstract

The paper suggests a framework for evaluating the relevance of strategies of private sector development in fostering sustained economic turnaround in fragile and post-conflict situations. It highlights how fragility, violence and conflict change economic structures, introducing distortions, trapping agents into “short-termism” and changing incentives toward rent-seeking, and explores strategies for supporting shifting economic systems from predation to production