Paul Romer: belief

Transcript context

…How optimistic are you more generally about the developmental trajectory for sub-Saharan Africa? There’s a saying I picked up from Gordon Brown, that in establishing the rule of law, the first five centuries are always the hardest. I think some parts of this development process are just very slow. If you look around the world, all the efforts since World War II that’s gone into trying to build strong, effective states, to establish the rule of law in a functioning state, I think the external investments in building states have yielded very little. So we need to think about ways to transfer the functioning of existing states rather than just build them from scratch in existing places. That’s a lot of the impetus behind this charter cities idea. It’s both — you select people coming in who have a particular set of norms that then become the dominant norms in this new place, but you also protect those norms by certain kinds of administrative structures, state functions that reinforce them. If we don’t pay attention to that and just keep doing what we’ve been doing in development assistance, I’m still fairly pessimistic about how many will make the radical transformation that China made. If you could reform the World Bank, what would you do?…

Stored transcript either side of the excerpt. The highlighted words are the published quote; the surrounding text is unedited source, never generated.