The Mohammed bin Rashid School Of Government will host the 2nd Global Conference on Economic Diversification (GCED) in Dubai in 2025 to address methodological, theoretical, policy focused, and thought-leadership outcomes based on the EDI dataset and beyond. GCED 2025 will bring together research scholars, academics, policy experts and government decision makers from around the world working on the frontiers of research and implementation of economic diversification.
Call for Papers
The GCED 2025 invites research and policy papers on economic diversification from around the world. Papers are expected to conduct analysis of the policies and determinants of economic diversification within a group of countries (regional, sub-regional, level of natural resource endowment), while using and making sense of the 2025 EDI findings and underlying data made available to researchers. We look to explicate and contextualize the factors that contribute to both temporary changes and structural transformations related to economic diversification. By bringing scholars and policy practitioners together through this timely series, we hope to build a repository of practice-relevant research around this essential topic. This would serve as an important contribution to the literature and policy around economic diversification at regional and global levels.
Why participate?
- Engage and network with global research and policy leaders from international organizations and top academic institutions working on the frontiers of economic diversification in a lively setting.
- Get peer review on your research work from top academics and scholars in the field
- Engage and foster research opportunities: Accepted papers will be eligible for the “Best paper award” and exceptional works will be compiled and featured in the Economic Diversification Index 2025 report to be launched at the World Government Summit 2025 in Dubai
- Conference proceedings from accepted papers will be published and available across the internet for public use.
- Travel grants and support will be available for eligible accepted authors to attend the conference.
Suggested topics
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The program committee of the 1st Global Conference on Economic Diversification seeks original research to tackle the different domains of economic diversification. The following list provides guiding examples of potential topics that are targeted in this call of papers, yet other topics are welcome. We are seeking papers that explore the following topics based on the Global Economic Diversification Index data:
- Comparative analysis of economic diversification paths in oil-producing countries and other commodity-dependent economies;
- Country case studies, utilizing historical data on diversification over the past 2 decades;
- Regional comparative analysis (based on regional groupings or sub-groupings available on the EDI website);
- Global governance implications of economic diversification considering the EDI datasets
- Policy analysis (country or regional-level) related to economic diversification practices;
- Methodological innovations exploring the EDI data in combination with qualitative or mixed method approaches;
- Institutionalist and path-dependency analysis of diversification trends on a national level.
- The impact of the technologies in the fourth industrial revolution, including AI and digitization, on policies or trajectories of economic diversification;
- Quantitative or qualitative analysis on paths of green economic diversification i.e., analyzing economic diversification trajectories that also contribute to a green growth path for the economy;
- Innovations in theorizing and measuring economic diversification;
- Expanded data analysis that utilize other relevant data sources that can add new dimensions of analysis to EDI datasets;
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Authors are highly encouraged to use the publicly available EDI data in their papers. However, papers that do not use the data but pertain to the suggested topics and in compliance with the submission guidelines will also be considered.
Author guidelines
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Manuscripts are to be submitted exclusively in either English or Arabic. Please refer to the “submission types” section on the call for papers for guidelines to be followed for each submission type, including word count and recommended format. Prior to submission, authors are advised to thoroughly proofread their work to eliminate any errors. Robustness checks on empirical analyses is encouraged. A bibliography section should be included at the end of the paper to cite references, with in-text citations following the MLA format guidelines.
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Submitted papers must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review. Papers that have been previously published or presented elsewhere, but have undergone substantial revision, enhancement, or modifications before submission to us may be considered.
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All work is expected to have original content written by the listed author(s) only. A full list of references must be cited for all types of work.
Contact
For questions related to submission, selection process and the Economic Diversification series/conference, please email: [email protected]
About the EDI
Despite economic diversification being an essential economic goal for countries around the globe as well as a widely studied topic in both the policy and academic worlds, there is no agreed upon universal measure of economic diversification. Policy discourse and research on economic diversification is often limited to the trade structure of a nation, linking the vulnerability of a nation to external shocks with a ripple effect on its economic growth and development. Empirical evidence focuses on the strong linkage between trade diversification, export-led growth and total GDP and/or per capita income of countries. While trade diversification is an important indicator of economic diversification, equally important are production and government revenue diversification. This realization triggered the development of the Global Economic Diversification Index (EDI), a global dataset and systematic method of measuring economic diversification.
In early 2022, the Mohammed bin Rashid School of Government (MBRSG) published the first edition of the EDI at the World Government Summit. The EDI is built on a cross-country, time series empirical analysis, allowing for a historical analysis of the evolution and extent of economic diversification across countries. Such an analysis represents a building block for further work to understand the macro-economic shifts, policy adjustments and strategic changes that allowed countries to either successfully diversify or, on the contrary, be held back in their path to diversification.
The inaugural edition of the EDI was based on the analysis of data from 83 countries, covering economies from all regions of the globe, income levels, and resource wealth/dependency. In 2023, the second edition of the Global EDI expanded the scope of coverage and analysis to include more than 100 countries. The third edition of the EDI has been published in 2024, with even further expanded coverage of 112 countries and thematic analysis focusing on the impact of digital trade on diversification, while EDI 2025 covered 115 countries.
As such, the EDI aims to fill the gap in the existing literature, data and empirical analysis: it represents a significant innovation and important addition to the analysis, discussion and policy efforts related to economic diversification. Furthermore, as a composite indicator, the EDI looks beyond trade to also include production/output and government revenue diversification, as the three dimensions forming the basis of the index. By design, the EDI is designed as rigorous ‘reproducible research’ and is solely based on publicly available data from reputable sources, following a methodology peer-reviewed by a panel of international experts. In order to ensure highest levels of methodological rigor, data validity, robustness, inclusiveness, acceptance and impact on policy discourses, the MBRSG has conducted peer and expert reviews at different stages of the EDI’s construction.
The full EDI datasets and analysis are made available openly for researchers, scholars, policymakers, and the global practitioners’ community to support global efforts that address economic diversification questions and developmental pathways. Based on that global dataset, the authors and the MBR School of Government invite the global community to further expand the research and analysis around economic diversification and develop thematic, regional or country-specific analysis, research, publications and policy outcomes.