Thanks for this great article, which leaves me with less hope than before I started reading it.
Like the author points out, none of these options have a lot of evidence that they have worked in the past, and the past often predicts the future. In fact things like Agriculture and Tourism have been tried as development routes by many governments without huge sucess.
Of all these, I think for many African countries, value added agriculutre as an export focused business has decent potential. Uganda produces Cocoa, Milk and Sugar in abundance, yet still basically doesn’t make any chocolate and loses out from that big time ass this great graph shows.
A huge problem is that the protectionism of the West still severely limits this possibility. Tarriffs and import controls force poor countries to export these raw products to rich countries so they can make the chocolate and coffee themselves and make most of the money from it. The EUs agriculture import policy might have been one of the biggest constraints to African countries’ development for some time now.
I think it can be easy to forget about the importance of educatoin deelopment too. As much as Taiwan’s chip boom was seeded by Taiwanese coming home, they had a world class education system (at least for the upper middle class) before that that took those engineers to the point that they were. The same can be said to some extent for the India’s IT growth. Without great education there isn’t a knowledge economy—you can’t export average knowledge services.
On Labour Migration, I still struggle to see how this can be a major driver of development. As a supplementary income source to help drive growth I think it is great, but how will just bringing in extra money (mostly to rich families) develop the country in the long term? Looking to the Phllipines again which is the darling of labor migration theory, they have a strong services export economy which was developed even while they were exporting all the labour. And both of those were built on a decent education system too.
Thanks for this great article, which leaves me with less hope than before I started reading it.
Like the author points out, none of these options have a lot of evidence that they have worked in the past, and the past often predicts the future. In fact things like Agriculture and Tourism have been tried as development routes by many governments without huge sucess.
Of all these, I think for many African countries, value added agriculutre as an export focused business has decent potential. Uganda produces Cocoa, Milk and Sugar in abundance, yet still basically doesn’t make any chocolate and loses out from that big time ass this great graph shows.
A huge problem is that the protectionism of the West still severely limits this possibility. Tarriffs and import controls force poor countries to export these raw products to rich countries so they can make the chocolate and coffee themselves and make most of the money from it. The EUs agriculture import policy might have been one of the biggest constraints to African countries’ development for some time now.
I think it can be easy to forget about the importance of educatoin deelopment too. As much as Taiwan’s chip boom was seeded by Taiwanese coming home, they had a world class education system (at least for the upper middle class) before that that took those engineers to the point that they were. The same can be said to some extent for the India’s IT growth. Without great education there isn’t a knowledge economy—you can’t export average knowledge services.
On Labour Migration, I still struggle to see how this can be a major driver of development. As a supplementary income source to help drive growth I think it is great, but how will just bringing in extra money (mostly to rich families) develop the country in the long term? Looking to the Phllipines again which is the darling of labor migration theory, they have a strong services export economy which was developed even while they were exporting all the labour. And both of those were built on a decent education system too.