Mesas Ejecutivas in Peru: Lessons for Productive Development Policies
| Published date | 01 September 2017 |
| Date | 01 September 2017 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1111/1758-5899.12457 |
Mesas Ejecutivas in Peru: Lessons for
Productive Development Policies
Piero Ghezzi
Former Minister of Production of Peru, GPD Partners
Abstract
Middle-income countries are likely to face an uncertain path to development. Their strategy may need to mutate from a focus
on manufacturing to a multipronged one. Unleashing the potential of those sectors requires cooperation between different
private and public actors that need to coordinate. Productive development policies (PDPs) are all about solving these coordi-
nation failures. When I became Minister of Production of Peru, I had the opportunity to lead a team that designed and imple-
mented a tool, Mesas Ejecutivas (MEs), that could be part of the toolkit of PDPs. A ME is a working group that includes private
and public actors around a sector or a factor of production. They aim at identifying and removing the constraints affecting
the productivity of the sector or factor, understanding that much will be learned during execution. The target audience for
this article is policymakers facing similar challenges. The main message should be that there are three main prerequisites for a
successful ME: (1) a private sector capable and interested in problem solving; (2) a public sector willing to participate and able
to deliver; and (3) some convener very high-up in government capable of inducing cooperation among the different stake-
holders, resolving disputes, enacting regulation and allocating budget.
Policy Implications
•More important than having long periods of consultation or fully developed plans that just need to be executed is to have
an initial plan and start executing
•Planning are doing are intertwined. Much will be learned executing
•Instead of a big bang approach start slowly
•Solving Public-private and public-public coordination is extremely important for unleashing the potential of sectors with
latent comparative advantages
•To solve problems of the productive sector it is necessary to move away from just purely horizontal policies and focus on
sector specific ones.
•The solutions of many coordination failures are not particularly costly (in terms of financial resources)
Middle-income countries are likely to face a more complex,
uncertain and difficult path to development than the one
experienced from those that did it before. Their develop-
ment strategy may need to mutate from an almost single-
minded focus on manufacturing to a multipronged one,
relying on all sectors with comparative advantages.
But the process of unleashing the potential of those sec-
tors requires cooperation between different private and
public actors that need to coordinate. That coordination
does not happen naturally. Because of the risk of capture or
simply of mistrust, private and public coordination is compli-
cated. Similarly, the public sector is used to work in silos,
while the solutions to most problems in government require
the coordination of several public entities.
The need to coordinate is not new, but the increased
uncertainty in the process of production, the complexity in
the relationship between private actors and the heightened
environmental, labor, phytosanitary, etc. requirements have
increased it by one order of magnitude. That demand for
coordination has been further augmented by the need to
reconcile the interests of large and small producers (which
excluding a handful of innovative start-ups are typically at
the verge of informality)
Productive development policies (or modern industrial
policies) are all about solving these coordination failures.
This requires institutionalizing a process that secures contin-
uous interaction between private and public actors. This will
allow sharing the information required to solve the prob-
lems of coordination, and also obtaining new information
while attempting to solve them.
There are not many successful and readily available PDP
tools that achieve those objectives. When I became Minister
of Production of Peru in February 2014, I had the opportu-
nity to lead a team that designed and implemented a tool,
Mesas Ejecutivas (MEs), with the potential of becoming part
of that restricted list.
A ME is a working group that includes the relevant pri-
vate and public actors around a sector or a factor of produc-
tion. The MEs try to avoid the common mistake of
generating lengthy reports that are not implementable or
endless meetings with much discussion but without execu-
tion. Also, the temptation of trying design a perfect plan
Global Policy (2017) 8:3 doi: 10.1111/1758-5899.12457 ©2017 University of Durham and John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.
Global Policy Volume 8 . Issue 3 . September 2017 369
Policy Insights
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