Structural Transformation in the Global South: Innovation and Enterprise as the New Engines of Development (Volume II) (Zenodo)

Summary

• Official development assistance fell by 23.1% in real terms in 2025 to US$174.3 billion, representing the largest annual drop on record.p.3
• Low- and middle-income countries paid US$436 billion more in debt service than they received in new financing between 2022 and 2025.p.3
• Process-level simulations of ready-made garment factories indicate advanced automation and AI could displace up to 58.4% of jobs per 1,500-worker factory.p.4
• India's Unified Payments Interface processed 228 billion transactions worth nearly ₹300 lakh crore in calendar year 2025.p.7
• Brazil's Pix processed 79.6 billion transactions in 2025, reaching a single-day record of 313.3 million transactions on 5 December 2025.p.8
• Global venture capital reached US$425 billion in 2025, with the United States capturing US$274 billion or 64% of the total.p.11
• Venture debt in African tech grew 63% year on year to reach a record US$1.64 billion in 2025.p.12

Key insights

1. Local and national actors directly received only 0.6% or US$174 million of humanitarian funding in 2023.p.3
2. Kazakhstan's national gross expenditure on R&D reached only 0.16% of GDP in 2024 compared to a world average of 2.60%.p.5
3. India accounted for 49% of the world's real-time payment transactions in 2023.p.7
4. Pix transactions cost Brazilian merchants an average of 0.33% of transaction value compared to 2.34% for credit cards.p.9
5. The IndiaAI Mission was approved in March 2024 with an outlay of ₹10,371.92 crore.p.10
6. Venture capital funding in the MENA region rose 225% to US$7.5 billion in 2025, which included about US$4 billion in debt financing.p.12
7. By 2025, M-KOPA had disbursed more than US$2 billion in micro-credit and served over 7 million customers across five African markets.p.14