Dani Rodrik: belief

Transcript context

…But say, let’s think of it from a political economy point of view. South Korea has done very well exporting, and that created for them a set of interest groups which were willing to fund that infrastructure, bring the whole country together so to speak. You end up with a middle class being built rapidly. That middle class is the foundation for a democracy. The special interest groups behind the infrastructure, it’s clear who they are. They win almost every political battle, even without a democracy. You see some version of the same in China. The countries that don’t industrialize, could you imagine them having an ongoing kind of ramshackle existence where consumer goods flood in at cheap prices? They grow at 4 percent instead of 10 percent. But Lagos, in a way, always looks a bit like current Lagos and never looks like Seoul, South Korea. What’s even a developed country, maybe, in some fundamental psychological sense, changes? I think what matters here is probably less the quantitative side, how rapidly you’re growing, but the qualitative things that are happening during the growth process. You have to bear in mind that there are archetypal, successful industrialization growth, liberal democracy kind of countries in fact, never experienced the kind of growth rate that Japan and South Korea or China did. In the aftermath of the Industrial Revolution, Great Britain was growing at rates that we would scoff at today for any emerging market. So, it wasn’t the growth itself that enabled the development of the middle class and the emergence and the spread of liberal values and the creating of the liberal democracy, but the transformation of the economy and its social structure in a particular kind of way: if you will, the spread of bourgeois liberal values, the restraints placed on the state in terms of how much it could do and under what kind of circumstances. You’re right that in countries like Nigeria and many others, which have had very rapid population growth, where the urban areas have swollen with people from the countryside. I think managing these kinds of tensions, especially when you’re in a sort of open economy and the markets are being flooded by cheap consumer goods from elsewhere, managing these transitions are very difficult, especially since these countries, and Africa, of course, particularly so, are torn apart by a number of additional cleavages of ethnic, language, regional, tribal, and so forth. Those are all things that are making it very, very difficult for these countries. I’m not so sure that rapid growth would necessarily have eliminated these kinds of problems. In some ways, it might even aggravate them. Think, for example, that in the Arab Spring, the kind of troubles and the riots that started the Arab Spring, arose not in those parts of the Arab world which had had the least amount of development but, in fact, in those countries like Tunisia and Egypt which had had the most rapid development. It wasn’t just GDP growth, per se. Tunisia was always an exemplar of improvements in human and social development. Civil society.…

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