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This paper reviews the literature for a project which seeks to develop a new Green Growth Diagnostics methodology and apply it to countries in Africa.

The original growth diagnostics methodology was developed by Haussmann, Rodrik and Velasco to identify the key constraints holding back economic growth from its full potential. Their approach was driven by the needs of policymakers facing the dilemma that most problems have multiple causes, but governments cannot tackle all of them at once, given limitations in their financial and executive capacity. This gave rise to the idea of concentrating these limited resources on the binding constraint, which would be identified going through a tool conceptualised as a decision tree. The proponents of the original growth diagnostics also realised that this binding constraint varies between countries and-we would argue-between sectors.