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But our intention here is to offer a more ambitious critique of global development. We do not seek to simply make a pessimist’s case for why economic development has not occurred, or why various statistical flaws mean that we should disregard undeniable progress in reducing global poverty. Rather, we aim to show why the prognosis for the poor world is much worse than the standard picture—preoccupied with a purely quantitative account, however rigorous, and ignorant of more geographic, historical, and political-economic approaches—has allowed; to explicate the structural changes that have undergirded the perverse trajectory of global development; and to outline a more realistic outlook, married to a new framework, for a return to real development.
The crux of the problem is this: despite attempts to find alternative models of economic development, there is no widely replicable strategy to develop a country—simply put, to turn it from poor to rich—that does not involve an economy becoming highly industrialized. But in recent decades, the growth of manufacturing sectors, and thus of economic development more broadly, has been overwhelmingly concentrated in East Asia, particularly in China. Across the bulk of the poor world—here we have in mind Latin America, South Asia, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa—economies have been experiencing a more disturbing trajectory: simultaneous deagrarianization and deindustrialization, especially in the years after 1980.
The result is that industrialization, development, and massive income growth in East Asia has statistically “compensated” for stagnation almost everywhere else—with East Asian industrialization partly responsible for the loss of other countries’ manufacturing bases. This has been the case even as incomes have risen in most of the poor world, mainly on account of the 2000–15 commodity supercycle driven in part by the explosive growth in demand from the Chinese market—which, ironically, helped lock emerging markets into low-tech, undiversified export profiles. Asian success, in short, has obscured a bleaker picture in the rest of the world.
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""" But our intention here is to offer a more ambitious critique of global development. We do not seek to simply make a pessimist’s case for why economic development has not occurred, or why various statistical flaws mean that we should disregard undeniable progress in reducing global poverty. Rather, we aim to show why the prognosis for the poor world is much worse than the standard picture—preoccupied with a purely quantitative account, however rigorous, and ignorant of more geographic, historical, and political-economic approaches—has allowed; to explicate the structural changes that have undergirded the perverse trajectory of global development; and to outline a more realistic outlook, married to a new framework, for a return to real development.
The crux of the problem is this: despite attempts to find alternative models of economic development, there is no widely replicable strategy to develop a country—simply put, to turn it from poor to rich—that does not involve an economy becoming highly industrialized. But in recent decades, the growth of manufacturing sectors, and thus of economic development more broadly, has been overwhelmingly concentrated in East Asia, particularly in China. Across the bulk of the poor world—here we have in mind Latin America, South Asia, the Middle East, and sub-Saharan Africa—economies have been experiencing a more disturbing trajectory: simultaneous deagrarianization and deindustrialization, especially in the years after 1980.
The result is that industrialization, development, and massive income growth in East Asia has statistically “compensated” for stagnation almost everywhere else—with East Asian industrialization partly responsible for the loss of other countries’ manufacturing bases. This has been the case even as incomes have risen in most of the poor world, mainly on account of the 2000–15 commodity supercycle driven in part by the explosive growth in demand from the Chinese market—which, ironically, helped lock emerging markets into low-tech, undiversified export profiles. Asian success, in short, has obscured a bleaker picture in the rest of the world. """