Glossary · plain English

The terms doing the work.

Short definitions for words that otherwise let arguments about development slide past each other.

Capability

A repeatable ability distributed across enough people, firms, and institutions to change what can be built next.

The spread of knowledge or productivity beyond a leading firm, laboratory, city, or sector.

The domestic network of component makers, toolmakers, specialists, and service firms beneath final production.

Coordinating people, components, quality, logistics, and schedules to manufacture a difficult product repeatedly at scale.

Control of hard production processes, tooling, critical components, and the engineering feedback needed to improve them.

The cost, quality, reliability, and delivery discipline imposed when firms must repeatedly satisfy foreign buyers.

Services such as software, design, engineering, finance, or business operations that can be sold across borders.

Shared digital rules and rails—often identity, payments, and data exchange—on which public and private services can interoperate.

Common rules that let different providers and systems work together across one shared stack.

An observed measure of what a student understands or can do.

Research and development expenditure as a share of GDP. It measures an input into research and invention.

The movement of workers and output from lower-productivity activities, often subsistence agriculture, into more productive firms and sectors.

A production process split across countries, with different places performing design, components, assembly, logistics, or marketing.

The share of an exported product’s value created by domestic labor, firms, knowledge, and components.

The ability of productive firms to grow in employment, output, management systems, and market reach.

Large enough to materially affect the country’s productive options across multiple regions or population groups.

A capability with several visible investments or outputs whose durability, depth, and diffusion remain under evaluation.

A result societies may value, such as broad prosperity or resilience. Branch completion changes its likelihood.