Economic Development

Focus On: Economic Development

MSMEs in emerging markets

It is not just banks in emerging markets that should grab this opportunity. Western banks will find innovative practices that they can use to refresh and adapt their traditional banking models back home. Read more

Key Insights

Help wanted: The future of work in advanced economies

Developing new responses to unemployment.

Mobile money: Getting to scale in emerging markets

Actionable recommendations to fill the financial services gap.

An economy that works: Job creation and America’s future

A factbase and policy framework that adds to the national conversation about jobs in the U.S.

21millionThe United States needs 21 million new jobs to return to 5% unemployment by 2020.
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More on Economic Development

Sustaining Vietnam’s growth: The productivity challenge

Vietnam’s economy has come an extraordinarily long way in a short time. China is the only Asian economy that has grown faster since 2000. But Vietnam now needs to boost labor productivity growth by more than 50 percent to maintain its rapid growth.

New credit-risk models for the unbanked

Using increased computing power and new sources of information and data (including mobile-phone usage patterns, utility-bill payment history, and others) to build better risk models.

McKinsey-Devex survey results: Measuring development agency effectiveness

In advance of the Fourth High-Level Forum on Aid Effectiveness in Busan, McKinsey partnered with Devex to determine how professionals in the development community view the effectiveness of their own agencies and the development sector overall.

How to Compete and Grow

Developing-country governments have an important role to play in creating an environment for economic growth. The best results happen when those efforts are tailored by industry sector.

Supply Chains Matter: Lessons from Haiti

Even the most efficient organizations are ill prepared for earthquakes and similar disasters. Our experience in Haiti and other disaster zones suggests that seven lessons about management, processes, and networks can make a difference when lives are on the line.

Growth, Colombian Style

Colombia’s example shows how faster economic development can result from collaboration by the private and public sectors to orchestrate microlevel reforms and foster innovation to compete in global markets.

Two trillion and counting

Assessing the financing gap for micro, small, and medium-size enterprises in developing countries.

Global financial inclusion

Achieving full financial inclusion at the intersection of social benefit and economic sustainability.

McKinsey on Africa: a continent on the move

The next decade will likely mark the first since the industrial revolution when emerging economies add more to global growth than all the developed countries combined. In our view, Africa will be a core part of this economic renaissance.

Can social entrepreneurs create large-scale change?

A What Matters collection of the latest global thinking from outside experts and McKinsey consultants.

The Business of Empowering Women

This report presents a case for why and how the private sector should intensify its engagement in the economic empowerment of women in developing countries.

Micro-, small and medium-sized enterprises in emerging markets

Inclusive growth and financial security

Discussing the potential for the adoption of an electronic payment system in India, which could reduce payment inefficiencies estimated to be Rs. 1 lakh crone annually (US$22.4 billion).

Creating change at scale through public-private partnerships

Lessons from an innovative financial inclusion partnership in Mexico that created a platform to provide access to government benefits and financial services for the hardest to reach of Mexico’s rural poor.

Changing the fortunes of America’s workforce

A comprehensive study of the causes of income dispersion in the United States and the growing human capital challenge.

Half the world is unbanked

New research finds that more than half the world’s adults do not use formal or semi-formal financial services to save or borrow.

New vistas in financial services: Lessons from international experiences

In India, there are a number of areas where innovation can encourage private, public, and social sector participation in order to take financial inclusion to scale.

McKinsey on Society