We Need Both Governments and the Profit Motive
March 15th, 2008 · No Comments · prosperity
Africa, More Trade, Less Aid
March 15th, 2008 · No Comments · prosperity
Either capitalism has worked, or it hasn’t, is a far too simplistic view of the nature of our economy. Capitalism is seen as the success story of the 20th century compared to communism and socialism. Whether it continues in its current form through this century is uncertain. What is likely is that it will change as the world changes.
Developing countries are looking to the success of the West, and copying its free-market economies. These countries are taking its capitalist values and using them to progress. This has worked in countries such as India and China.
Africa is a wholly different problem. Economies in these countries are not progressing, and in some cases getting worse. Paul Collier is Director of the Centre for the Study of African Economics at Oxford and his book The Bottom Billion provide some answers to why it hasn’t worked there.
Collier lists these structural problems: bad governance, internal conflict, land locked territories, and too much reliance on income from natural resources.
Ethan Zuckerman is an activist and in his review of this book he says,
The most depressing part of this argument is that Collier believes some of these nations may simply have “missed the boat”. They might have had a chance to enter into labour-intensive fields a couple of decades ago - now those fields are so thoroughly dominated by nations like China that these countries might need to wait for China to develop to the point where labour becomes expensive, a process that might take decades to become widespread.