Actually I do agree with most of that, though I do come at this from a slightly different perspective because I more familiar with things like the failure of banking systems than with the succession of civil wars in so many former colonies.
It has always been of interest to me to try to tease out the failures that are due to productivity from failures that are due to the system of resource distribution. Two contrasting examples: Nigeria and Tanzania.
Something like 50% of the farmland in Nigeria remains owned by British nationals, and they are using it to produce for export to Great Britain and the rest of the world. They are also expatriating their profits from Nigeria and spending them in other places around the world. So in a very real sense, all that land resource is not part of the Nigeria market at all. It is part of some other market. The failure of Nigeria to develop a flourishing internal economy is therefore due in large measure to its resource distribution.
In Tanzania, by contrast, Nyere instituted a land reform that expropriated British land holdings and retitled them as cooperative farms. But the farms continued to produce for export, and they grew the same crop that the British had been growing: coffee. The farms failed miserably, and it is generally blamed on the cooperative system that Nyere established, but what few people realize is that the farms had never been successful. When they were owned by Brits they were heavily subsidized by the British government. Coffee can not in fact be grown productively and profitably in Tanzania. The failure was due not to the system of resource distribution but to the productivity of that particular land in that particular use.
Countries that accepted World Bank loans in the 1950s were forced to develop their manufacturing sectors when most of them needed to develop their agricultural sector and their banking systems. Economists are to blame for the failure of all those manufacturing ventures to add value to their economies because we were working from flawed theories of development.
So I think that in every country you look at, you see a little bit different picture. But corruption and instability are endemic in the third world, and those things have to be corrected first before any strides can be made economically.
Cuba is ridiculed in the United States, but the income disparity is much less there than in countries that have followed the US model and allowed their credit resources to be furnished by the US. We hear all the time how much wealthier the upper class of Honduras is compared to the upper class of Cuba, but it is also true (though rarely published here) that the lower class of Cuba is much wealthier than the lower class of Honduras. Which of these models one thinks is better depends partly on ideology, but also partly on how one believes that countries bootstrap up to developed status. And as long as military solutions are being imposed from without to create particular outcomes, it is hard to get good data on how the system of resource distribution is affecting the productivity.
Jn
