The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World - Hardcover

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Steven Radelet holds the Donald F. McHenry Chair in Global Human Development at Georgetown University and is a Nonresident Senior Fellow at the Brookings Institution. His work focuses on economic growth, poverty reduction, foreign aid, and debt, primarily in Africa and Asia. He has worked in developing countries around the world for thirty years and currently serves as economic adviser to the President of Liberia. He is the author of The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World and Emerging Africa: How 17 Countries Are Leading the Way.

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The Great Surge

PROLOGUE

November 9, 1989

ON NOVEMBER 9, 1989, THE People of Namibia in Southwest Africa Gathered in droves to wait under a sweltering sun and claim a prize for which they had fought for decades: the right to vote. A remarkable 98 percent of registered voters turned out over five days to select delegates to a constituent assembly that would draft a new constitution and set the stage for presidential elections and the formation of a new government.1

The Namibians lining up that day had no way of knowing it, but their actions would reverberate far beyond their borders and mark the beginning of a slow but steady sweep of democracy across Africa.

They could not know that exactly as they were voting, forces were under way that would bring about some of the most important changes in world history. Far to the east that same day, Deng Xiaoping was resigning as chairman of China’s Central Military Commission, his last formal post in the Communist Party leadership. Deng had transformed the Chinese economy by abandoning Mao Tse-tung’s rigid Communism and adopting a more mixed, market-based economy. His resignation marked a key political change: It effectively ended the tradition of Chinese leaders ruling like emperors until death.2 It also shifted power from a single supreme leader to the group leadership of the party and effectively marked the beginning of de facto term limits. Imperial strongman rule in China was over.

Meanwhile, that very afternoon, five thousand miles away in Berlin, the government of East Germany capitulated to overwhelming upheaval and threw open the country’s western borders for the first time in twenty-eight years. The Berlin Wall was coming down. Political relationships and systems around the world were about to undergo seismic changes—most obviously in Eastern Europe, but also in Namibia and in developing countries around the world. Dictators supported by the United States and the Soviet Union would fall. Proxy wars and conflict that had wreaked havoc in developing countries would decline. Communism as both an economic and political system would lose its last shreds of credibility. Ideas and ideologies would change. Trade would expand and technology would spread. Dozens of developing countries would adopt more vibrant and accountable political systems and more market-based and open economic strategies.

The greatest surge of progress in developing countries in world history was about to begin.

The Great Surge

ONE

A GREAT TRANSFORMATION

What is happening in Liberia is but a microcosm of the transformation that is sweeping across many countries. Dictators are being replaced by democracy. Authoritarianism is giving way to accountability. Economic stagnation is turning to resurgence. And most important, despair is being replaced by hope—hope that people can live in peace with their neighbors, that parents can provide for their families, that children can go to school and receive decent health care, and that people can speak their minds without fear.

—Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, president of the Republic of Liberia

WE LIVE AT A TIME of the Greatest Development Progress among the Global poor in the history of the world. Never before have so many people, in so many developing countries, made so much progress in so short a time in reducing poverty, increasing incomes, improving health, reducing conflict and war, and spreading democracy.

If you find that hard to believe, you are not alone. Most people believe the opposite: that with a few exceptions such as China and India, the majority of developing countries are stuck in deep poverty, led by inept dictators, and living with pervasive famine, widespread disease, constant violence, and little hope for progress.

The old story is no longer true. A major transformation is under way—and has been for two decades now—in the majority of the world’s poorest countries, largely unnoticed by much of the world. Since the early 1990s, 1 billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty. The average income for hundreds of millions of people in dozens of poor countries has more than doubled, 6 million fewer children die every year from disease, war and violence have declined significantly, average life expectancy has increased by six years, tens of millions more girls are in school, the share of people living in chronic hunger has been cut nearly in half, millions more people have access to clean water, and democracy—often fragile and imperfect—has become the norm rather than the exception in developing countries around the world.

To be sure, the surge of progress in health, income, poverty, education, and governance has not reached everyone: many poor countries remain mired in poverty and conflict, and even in the countries moving forward, millions of people are still left behind, even if their numbers are shrinking. Rapid progress has brought new challenges, especially around urbanization, environmental degradation, and climate change, that raise critical questions about long-term sustainability. Nevertheless, the majority of poor countries—and hundreds of millions of individual people living in those countries—are now making greater progress in a wider range of development indicators than ever before.

This book tells the story of this remarkable economic, social, and political transformation among the global poor. The pages that follow show how the end of the Cold War, the demise of Communism, groundbreaking new technologies, increased global integration, local action, courageous leadership, and in some cases, good fortune, have combined to improve the fate of hundreds of millions of people in poor countries around the world. How did these extraordinary changes come about? Why have some countries moved forward, while others have remained behind? What do these changes mean for the rest of the world? And most important, can the gains continue? Or will climate change, resource demand, demographic pressures, economic and political mismanagement, or possible war conspire to derail the great surge in development progress?

• • •

The story of the dramatic progress in developing countries begins in the 1960s. In the immediate post–World War II era, several countries in East and Southeast Asia (alongside a few others like Botswana and Mauritius) began to make remarkable advances that continue today. China began its rapid resurgence in 1980, in many ways setting the stage for the broader transformation that followed in other countries. Some other developing countries started to move forward, only to see progress halt in the late 1970s and 1980s following the global oil shocks and subsequent debt crises. However, most developing countries made little headway—that is, until the early 1990s, when progress accelerated and dozens of developing countries around the world began to move forward.

My central focus is on four critical dimensions of development progress: poverty, income, health and education, and democracy and governance (although I will touch on many others). Global poverty is falling—fast. In 1993 almost 2 billion people around the world lived in extreme poverty on less than $1.25 per day.I Then, for the first time in history, the...