Thanks for your post. I’m from a developing country and, after living some months in Europe, I couldn’t stop thinking about this subject. Things like “why don’t they have any holesin the streets pavement?”; it evoked me Cixin Liu’s Dark Forest, when humans first meet the “droplet and are astonished by its perfect flatness.
Let me add some non-structured remarks:
I think your “three sources of bad governance” are still too vague to be useful; moreover, they’re not totally endemic to developing/poor countries (and even among them, it works in very different ways), and they seem to relate with bad governance (and outcomes) in a feedback loop. I think a good path is to compare many different societies and how they’ve dealt with those problems, like Acemoglu & Robinson’s Why Nations Fail. Focusing on culture (something really hard to change) and how those societies fulfill positions (which ends up depending too much on culture, education and politics) seems to be a better start.
I think you’ve mentioned what seems to me the real problem: developing countries governments (exception: China) are less capable of engaging in long-term planning, particularly to address uncertain risks / outcomes. Some really bad feedback loops explain that: politics (they plan for the next election), urgencies (after you’ve paid for disaster relief, social security, debt and compulsory spending...) and, of course, culture (there’s a beautiful Brazilian samba Felicidade (“Happiness”), with a verse like “we work the whole year for this brief moment, the carnival”). This reflects in education (which usually only pays-off years after reforms are implemented), macroeconomics (higher interest rates), infrastructure (Brazil adopted an annual social discount rate of 10% for infrastructure projects; and, like the example of the pavement, low-quality infrastructure and maintenance is usual), catastrophe prevention, etc.
One of the challenges of proposing a reform is how it affects the current status quo; for instance, think of political reform and pension legislation. I wonder if proposing reforms to be implemented years later, so leaving the current status quo unaffected, isn’t usually more successful, and if it has been tried in these countries.
I think geography is underrated: development concentrates in clusters (it’s easier to develop if your neighbor does it, too), and, though almost no one talks about it, seems to be highly correlated with climate (though this might be partly explained by culture + this neighbor effect, but the correlation remains even in the same country). I really hope Sachs’s new book casts some light on that. (These spreadsheets I found by googling; I checked only a little bit of the data, so be careful with them)
I wonder if someone has ever made anonymous interviews with junior and senior civil officers (and maybe businessmen, too) from these countries about this subject. I’d really like to read it.
I think the idea of charter cities is that “it’s so hard to change these current inadequate equilibria that we better start anew somewhere else”. A micro-revolution. It might work out great in the long-term, for some places—but I don’t think it would solve
Thanks for your post. I’m from a developing country and, after living some months in Europe, I couldn’t stop thinking about this subject. Things like “why don’t they have any holes in the streets pavement?”; it evoked me Cixin Liu’s Dark Forest, when humans first meet the “droplet and are astonished by its perfect flatness.
Let me add some non-structured remarks:
I think your “three sources of bad governance” are still too vague to be useful; moreover, they’re not totally endemic to developing/poor countries (and even among them, it works in very different ways), and they seem to relate with bad governance (and outcomes) in a feedback loop. I think a good path is to compare many different societies and how they’ve dealt with those problems, like Acemoglu & Robinson’s Why Nations Fail. Focusing on culture (something really hard to change) and how those societies fulfill positions (which ends up depending too much on culture, education and politics) seems to be a better start.
I think you’ve mentioned what seems to me the real problem: developing countries governments (exception: China) are less capable of engaging in long-term planning, particularly to address uncertain risks / outcomes. Some really bad feedback loops explain that: politics (they plan for the next election), urgencies (after you’ve paid for disaster relief, social security, debt and compulsory spending...) and, of course, culture (there’s a beautiful Brazilian samba Felicidade (“Happiness”), with a verse like “we work the whole year for this brief moment, the carnival”). This reflects in education (which usually only pays-off years after reforms are implemented), macroeconomics (higher interest rates), infrastructure (Brazil adopted an annual social discount rate of 10% for infrastructure projects; and, like the example of the pavement, low-quality infrastructure and maintenance is usual), catastrophe prevention, etc.
One of the challenges of proposing a reform is how it affects the current status quo; for instance, think of political reform and pension legislation. I wonder if proposing reforms to be implemented years later, so leaving the current status quo unaffected, isn’t usually more successful, and if it has been tried in these countries.
I think geography is underrated: development concentrates in clusters (it’s easier to develop if your neighbor does it, too), and, though almost no one talks about it, seems to be highly correlated with climate (though this might be partly explained by culture + this neighbor effect, but the correlation remains even in the same country). I really hope Sachs’s new book casts some light on that. (These spreadsheets I found by googling; I checked only a little bit of the data, so be careful with them)
I wonder if someone has ever made anonymous interviews with junior and senior civil officers (and maybe businessmen, too) from these countries about this subject. I’d really like to read it.
I think the idea of charter cities is that “it’s so hard to change these current inadequate equilibria that we better start anew somewhere else”. A micro-revolution. It might work out great in the long-term, for some places—but I don’t think it would solve