Enhancing Namibia’s Capacity for Climate-compatible Industrial Policy to Overcome the Middle-Income Trap

Antonia Andreoni

CDP Background Papers from United Nations, Department of Economics and Social Affairs

Abstract: In 2025 Namibia reached a critical crossroad in its sustainable development journey. Namibia is facing key structural challenges characterizing middle-income countries. They are the challenge of breaking into the global economy, linking up into value chains, linking back in the domestic economy and keeping pace with technological change. The formulation of a Green Industrialization Blueprint in 2024 recognized that the country can leapfrog into a green industrialization future. The development of the oil and gas industry offers a different pathway towards a petrostate scenario. The Namibian government faces increasing trade-offs and pressure to back up one of these different types of enclave investments—one focused on green hydrogen and one on fossil fuels. There are however alternative and intermediate pathways which could be crafted through new industrial policy and mixed sectoral prioritisation strategies. Based on the assessment of Namibia’s current structural challenges as well as its industrial policy experience so far, the paper advances nine concrete and feasible policy recommendations clustered around three areas—state capacity development, sectoral development interventions, investments in social and environmental drivers.

Keywords: Namibia; Middle-income trap; Industrial policy; Capacity development (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: L52 O14 O25 O55 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026-02
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://policy.desa.un.org/sites/default/files/2026-02/cdp-bp-2026-61.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:une:cpaper:061

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in CDP Background Papers from United Nations, Department of Economics and Social Affairs Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Aimee Gao ().