Design Education and the Nigerian Economy
A look at the history of Nigeria reflects that in all spheres of life, nature has provided for the country to be a high performing economic success. Nigeria, the largest in Africa, is rich in human, cultural and natural resources. Nigeria could be described as the Greece of Africa. The influence of Nigerian arts, crafts and design have been felt strongly in other parts of the world. It is lamentable that while most emerging economies are harnessing design education for development and improving quality of lives of their citizenry, the Nigerian political climate has not enabled the formulation of strategic policies that can boost industrial climate of the economy. This has not provided the support and appropriate infrastructure for indigenous design education and development capabilities.  The paper takes a look at the current political policies of Nigeria, its economic reality in the absence of formidable design groups and design policy that can enhance indigenous technical knowhow. The paper also examines the value oriented benefits inherent in design education as experienced in developed economies and how it can be channeled to make its contributions to grow the Nigerian economy.
Industrial Design in Turkey: A Historical Segmentation in Policy, Industry and Design
As being one of the newly developing economies of the world, Turkey lately realized the contribution of industrial design to the government policies for a sustainable development. Two periods of industrialization in Turkish history which were characterized by their own patterns of production were separated by activities of Customs Union with EU in 1980's. Even after Customs Union, being unaware of the design scope; national development has been relied upon compartmentalized fields in industry, innovation, research and development where the integration problem was deteriorated by unstable economic and political situation. This article examines the dynamics that have influenced the emergence and maturation of industrial design in Turkey and the role of design policies which can successfully contribute to social and economic development that finally began to be situated in developmental strategies. In this progress, non-governmental institutions were the active role players for a bottom-to-up conduct and integration of design to government policies.
Did the metamorphosis from Export Processing Zones to Special Economic Zones improve the efficiency of trade enclaves in India?
In this paper, the efficiency of seven conventional Special Economic Zones in India is analyzed, by adopting a stochastic production frontier technique, for the period between 1986–1987 and 2007–2008.Results indicate that although the efficiency scores of these enclaves have improved over the years, specifically with the introduction of the SEZ policy (2000–2001), it is far below the threshold level as identified in the literature. Besides, one can also observe a discrepancy emerging between better export earning zones and efficient zones. On the determinants side, policy intervention and large geographical area, accompanied by clustering of units, are found to have impacted the efficiency scores of these enclaves positively.