When Growth ≠ Prosperity: A New Calculus for Growth Markets

By Shamil Ibragimov, Director of Research, MIT Kuo Sharper Center

On April 22–23, 2026, five hundred practitioners, policymakers, entrepreneurs, and researchers gathered at MIT from fifty countries across six continents. They came from Almaty and Accra, from Dubai and São Paulo, from Tashkent and Nairobi. The diversity was striking. What was more striking, however, was the convergence: virtually every participant, regardless of geography, arrived carrying a version of the same frustration. Their economies were growing, but their people were not prospering. And no one could quite explain why the distance between those two realities kept widening.

For decades, the dominant framework of economic development has offered a confident answer to the question of growth. The Solow–Swan model, still the canonical template of growth economics, tells us that output expands through capital accumulation, labor growth, and technological progress, and that at the frontier of long-run growth lies the engine of technical change. It is an elegant model, but it has also proven insufficient. Not because it is incorrect, but because it answers the wrong question. It tells us how economies grow, but almost nothing about who benefits when they do or why growth so often fails to become prosperity.

That gap is the founding problem of the MIT Kuo Sharper Center for Prosperity and Entrepreneurship: why growth in these markets remains so volatile, so fragile, and so poorly connected to the lives of the people. We call our framework the New Calculus for Shared Prosperity. The April conference was its first global stress test. What we heard from fifty countries confirmed our central premise and sharpened our understanding of what it will take to act on it.

The Abundance We Keep Misreading

The dominant global narrative about what we traditionally call “emerging markets” is organized around lack. These are economies defined by what they do not yet have - mature institutions, deep capital markets, technological frontier capacity - and the development project is implicitly cast as the long process of closing that gap with the advanced world.

This narrative is not just analytically incomplete. It is actively corrosive. It positions growth markets as peripheral to the global innovation economy: as recipients of knowledge and capital rather than generators of it; as testing grounds for ideas whose primary destinations lie elsewhere. And it shapes behavior. The most talented founders relocate. The most promising technologies are imported. Local ambition calibrates itself to a standard of success never designed with local conditions in mind.

What the April conference made visible, through regional workshops focused on Africa, the Arab region, Central Asia, and Latin America, is that this narrative is empirically wrong.

Growth markets are not spaces of scarcity. They are spaces of extraordinary abundance.

Demographic abundance: the countries represented at our conference hold the majority of the world’s working-age population; one that is younger, more entrepreneurial, and more digitally native than any prior generation.

Resource abundance: from the rare earth minerals of Africa and Central Asia, critical to the energy transition, to agricultural land and some of the world’s most underutilized water systems.

And perhaps least recognized, but most consequential: an abundance of ideas.

The entrepreneurs and innovators who filled that room in Cambridge were not waiting for inspiration to arrive from Silicon Valley. They were building solutions to problems that Silicon Valley has never had to solve, at a scale that makes the solutions, when they work, among the most significant in the world.

The problem is not the absence of raw material for prosperity. The problem is that existing economic, institutional, and narrative frameworks systematically fail to convert that abundance into broadly shared, self-reinforcing value.

This is what the New Calculus calls compound failure: not the absence of growth, but the progressive attenuation of growth's impact as it passes through broken institutional architecture, structural exclusion, and ecosystems whose nodes have never learned to connect.

A Different Set of Questions

The New Calculus does not begin by asking how to generate more growth. It begins by asking how effectively an economy converts the growth it already has into expanded capability, opportunity, and resilience for its people.

This is a harder question. It requires diagnostic precision about three distinct channels through which economic value leaks before it reaches the majority:
i) the concentration of activity in sectors that generate revenue without building productive capacity;
ii) the structural exclusion of the informal majority from the institutions that convert labor into compounding human capital; and
iii) the disconnection of the innovation ecosystem’s nodes from one another - leaving universities, risk capital, government, corporations, and entrepreneurs generating energy in isolation rather than compounding it together.

What the framework then asks - and what the April conference spent two days actively working through - is how to design the institutional architecture that addresses all three channels simultaneously.

The conversation did not stop at diagnosis. Participants moved from mapping frictions to building solutions. One of the most significant to emerge was a joint initiative between the MIT Kuo Sharper Center and UM6P (Université Mohammed VI Polytechnique), one of Africa’s most ambitious research universities, to establish a global consortium explicitly designed to bridge the gap between deep tech research and commercial impact.

It is precisely the kind of institutional architecture the New Calculus calls for: not a bilateral agreement between two institutions, but the deliberate construction of a connective node capable of activating ecosystems across multiple geographies at once.

Central to this architecture is what we call Space: the deliberate creation of environments where stakeholders across five groups - government, academia, risk capital, the corporate sector, and entrepreneurs - can surface frictions, build shared understanding, and develop a common vision of what their ecosystem is building toward, and for whom.

Not a vision imported from a development template, but one grounded in local evidence, articulated in local voices, and sustained by local institutional commitment.

What We Owe the Next Conversation

The fifty countries represented in that room at MIT had something in common beyond their shared frustration: they have agency. The structural barriers that the New Calculus diagnoses are not immutable features of growth market economies. They are design problems—and design problems have solutions.

What the conference demonstrated, most powerfully, is that those solutions are already being built. By entrepreneurs in Brazil reengineering credit systems for informal workers. By policymakers in Central Asia constructing innovation infrastructure before resource rents collapse. And by founders across Africa building for the one billion consumers that incumbent global platforms have never designed for.

The New Calculus for Prosperity is not a theory waiting for practice. In growth markets, the practice is already ahead of the theory. Our task - as researchers, institution-builders, and a global community of practitioner- is to catch up, to document what is working, and to build the connective architecture that allows these solutions to compound.

Growth, on its own, is not enough. It never was.

But what became clear over those two days in Cambridge is that the future of shared prosperity will not be designed in a single place, nor dictated by a single model. It will be built patiently, imperfectly, and collaboratively by those closest to the challenges, and closest to the opportunity.

The work is already underway.

The question is no longer whether growth markets can lead. It is whether we are ready to listen, to learn from what is already working, and to build the systems that allow those solutions to scale and endure.

Fifty countries came together in that room at MIT not to agree on a theory but to begin shaping a different path forward.

The work now is to follow through.