somewhere between the fifth and tenth year of operations. Figure 6 maps the export growth paths of a two successful EPZs – Suzhou in China and Costa Rica – from their first year of operations. Three African (Ghana, Kenya, and Lesotho) and three non‐African (Bangladesh, Dominican Republic, and Vietnam) programs are compared<sup>16</sup> . Figure 6 shows that most zone programs start slowly, growing linearly in the initial stages, before hitting a growth inflection point. The two Asian programs then grow exponentially with, as yet, no sign of slowing. The Latin American examples, however, show a slower (although still strong) growth path and then hit a point of declining growth or stagnation, although in the case of Costa Rica there is some evidence of a renewed cycle of increasing growth. The differences between the Asian and Latin American growth patterns here are probably related to factors such as: timing (the Latin American programs launched in the 1970s, while the Asian programs did so at the outset of a period of huge growth in production‐network driven global trade in the early 1990s); the concurrence of wider reforms (in Vietnam and China, the zone programs were one small element of major economic reform initiatives that opened their economies for the first time in half a century); and the huge differences in scale between the Latin American and Asian economies under comparison.

**Figures 6 and 7: EPZ Export growth trajectories (US$m) by year of operation**

<!-- Start of picture text --> 12,000 5,000<br>4,500<br>10,000<br>4,000<br>8,000 3,500<br>3,000<br>6,000<br>2,500<br>4,000 2,000<br>1,500<br>2,000 1,000<br>‐ 500<br>Year Year Year Year Year Year Year Year Year Year Year Year Year Year Year Year Year Year Year Year ‐<br>1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 Year Year Year Year Year Year Year Year Year Year Year Year Year Year Year Year Year Year Year Year<br>1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20<br>Suzhou Cost Rica DR Bangladesh<br>Vietnam Ghana Kenya Lesotho Cost Rica DR Bangladesh Ghana Kenya Lesotho<br><!-- End of picture text --> Sources: Author’s calculations based on data from individual country EPZ authorities; Arce‐Alpazar et al (2005) for Costa Rica; Zhao & Farole (2010) for Suzhou Of the three African programs, only Ghana appears to be showing evidence of shifting to the higher growth path, although it is unclear how sustainable this growth will be as it is dependent to a large degree on processed commodities (cocoa and timber) which are both limited in their availability and face significant cyclical price fluctuations. Figure 7 removes China and Vietnam to give a clearer picture of the growth paths of the African zones against some relevant comparators<sup>17</sup> . Here it becomes clearer that exports from both Kenya and Lesotho are growing, but they are failing to take off. In contrast the formerly slow‐growing EPZ program in Bangladesh appears, after 10‐12 years, to have moved to a much faster growth path. This is driven by the increasing competitiveness of Bangladesh in the global

> 16 Unfortunately, we have insufficient time series data on Senegal and Nigeria to include them in the analysis, and the Tanzania program has too little history to be useful for this analysis. It is worth noting that based on what we know anecdotally about the Nigeria and Senegal programs, had their data been available it would strongly support the conclusions we make here.

> 17 Note that we have data on Lesotho only from 2000

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