Jeffrey Sachs: evaluation

Transcript context

…But when you say mining, I worry about your own resource curse. When you say services, India has done this to some extent, as we all know. But if you look at Indian service exports, they’re often done out of a kind of feudal bastion, almost. Companies which build their own roads, their own infrastructure, almost like small private cities. If you’re inside that sphere, it works pretty well for you. But it’s actually a very small segment of the Indian population. That space, they have a head start there. If you think what percent of the Nigerian workforce can be employed exporting services . . . Do you think there’s an argument it could be more than three or 4 percent? I think the question of how any low-income country pays its way in the world, as I said, is a real question. If it weren’t for that question, there is no shortage of identifiable jobs that Africa needs for the coming two generations. It needs teachers and it needs doctors and it needs construction workers and it needs engineers and it needs public administration and it needs everything, because it’s coming from poor, rural, overwhelmingly agriculture. I’m not worried about the job root, but what I am worried about is the balance of payments basically, which is that like any of us, we thrive if we can sell our services somehow. That’s true at a country level as it is at an individual level. If you are in an environment where you have nothing to sell, you may have a comparative advantage but if you have nothing to sell, it doesn’t matter. Everybody, every place has a comparative advantage but it doesn’t necessarily make you prosperous. I worry very much about places like Chad, Niger, Central African Republic, Mali because they’re landlocked, they are in incredibly difficult physical geographic conditions, very dry, drying most likely, warming, massive disease burden, most of them with no easy natural resource base, too far from ports to do any kind of assembly operations. It’s a stepping stone for development. Geography again.…

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