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Industrial parks are as popular as they are controversial, in India and globally. At their best they align infrastructure provision and agglomeration economies to jolt industrial growth. More often, they generate negative spillovers, provide handouts, sit empty, or simply do not get built. This paper disaggregates how parks are built and how they fail. It contextualizes parks in India, followed by a thick case study of an innovative scheme that appears to buck the trend. This performance is then explained by the way in which the scheme's design and action fit India's political economy. The paper concludes by considering how the analysis and the lessons learned might inform the design and implementation of industrial park programs and other public interventions, in India and elsewhere.

This paper briefly summarizes the development experiences of special economic zones (SEZs) in China and Africa (especially the Sub-Saharan Africa), the lessons that Africa can learn from China, and the preliminary results of the Chinese investments in SEZs in Africa. The study makes recommendations on how to unleash the power of SEZs and industrial parks in Africa through strategically leveraging the Chinese experiences. While the Chinese experiences with SEZs and industrial parks are generally successful, Africa's experience has been relatively poor. Moving forward, they can greatly benefit from the Chinese experiences, especially the Chinese zones in Africa.

To obtain precise information about enterprises’ pollution control and take corresponding environmental protection measures is the key to preventing and controlling industrial pollution. Taking the lead–acid battery industry as an example, this paper employs data from the Environmental Enforcement Action to analyze the urban–rural and inter-provincial distributions of pollution-intensive enterprises and to quantitatively verify the spatial differences in China’s environmental regulation on industrial pollution. The study finds that lead–acid battery manufacturing enterprises are mainly located in rural areas instead of urban areas; most pollution-intensive firms located in industrial parks, especially those approved by governments below the provincial level. The multivariate logistic model analysis finds that environmental regulation in urban districts is more strict than that in towns and villages, while the suburban areas are the laxest; environmental regulation in national-level development zones is more strict than that in provincial-level development zones, while zones below the provincial level are the laxest. In general, the environmental regulation is stricter in urban areas than in rural areas, and stricter in clustered space than in scattered space, while most inter-provincial environmental regulations have no significant differences. Local governments should effectively allocate conventional environmental law enforcement resources and shift the focus of law enforcement downwards to parks below the provincial level, and on suburbs and townships.

China–Ethiopia economic cooperation in the period of 2000–2020 is marked by the convergence between the industrial policy of Ethiopia, the orientations of the Forum on China–Africa Cooperation (FOCAC), and the infrastructure development strategy which is the cornerstone of China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI).

China, the largest foreign investor in Ethiopia during this period, has had a major role in terms of investment and financing in the energy sector and the transportation infrastructure: Addis Ababa Airport, roads, railway, seaport terminal, and gas pipeline.

The flagship project — the Addis Ababa–Djibouti Railway — connecting Addis Ababa to Djibouti City and Djibouti’s Doraleh Container Terminal, inaugurated in 2018, provided landlocked Ethiopia with a good connection between the hinterland and the seaport: the economic corridor accounts for more than 95% of Ethiopia’s foreign trade.

The development of Ethiopian Industrial Parks on the model of Chinese Special Economic Zones (SEZs) was the second pillar of the strategy of development of an export-oriented manufacturing sector. Chinese companies operating in Ethiopian Industrial Parks in the textile and leather industries have been pioneering this activity contributing to Ethiopia’s participation in the Global Value Chains (GVCs).

Ethiopian government is also planning the development of agro-industrial parks specialized in added-value agricultural products such as coffee or cut flowers exported to Europe via Addis Ababa Airport and Ethiopian Airlines Cargo.

Ethiopia’s main challenges in that direction are the necessity to go up the value chain to further penetrate European markets and, most likely, to identify the products or services which could be integrated into the African markets in the new context of the African Continental Free Trade Area (AfCFTA) agreement that entered into force in January 2021.

In recent years, industrial parks have played an important role in economic development in less developed areas in China. The purpose of this research is to identify key factors impacting sustainable development of industrial parks. Based on the relevant literature, this paper proposed undertaking green industry transfer as a primary factor. Additive synthesis method was used to build a comprehensive evaluation model for undertaking green industry transfer and industrial parks in Jiangxi. Data of the model were got from Jiangxi Statistical Yearbook and China Industry Economy Statistical Yearbook. On this basis, the paper used SPSS 20.0 to analyze the linkage between undertaking green industry transfer and sustainable development of industrial parks. The results confirm that undertaking green industry transfer affects industrial parks positively and significantly in the sustainable development. According to the results, governments in less developed areas should focus more on undertaking green industry transfer to promote local economic development.