I’m talking about entirely post-apartheid *technical *successes (your much ballyhooed “high cognitive fields”, like AEON, meerKAT and hopefully the full SKA, not anything as nebulous as “economic success” that mostly depended on pure resource exploitation like gold and diamonds - I’d hardly call forcing blacks to work in mines a “high-cognitive field”.
ETA - I responded to that post before I read the following posts - sorry for returning to the hijack.
Suffice to say, I think the key to turning a developing country into a developed one is education and provision of free basic services like health and sanitation, especially to women and children.
It is in this thread.
Go back and read the OP and then read my comments.
This thread is in regard to a hypothetical way to move a hypothetical country from “developing” to “developed.” A certain amount of real world example from countries that did or did not make the transition is acceptable, but getting mired into a discussion that some large world region “can” or “cannot” make that transition due to inherent charactistics of the people belongs in a separate thread.
[ /Moderating ]
Do you have a citation for this? I’d be interested to read it.
You can claim that situation exists in many middle eastern countries. There is no rich uncle philanthropist or anything, but there are trillions of dollars in easily extractable natural resources (oil and natural gas) that countries can rely on to obtain easy cash. Kuwait, Qatar & UAE all have small populations and endless billions in easy oil money. The per capita income in those countries is $60,000 or higher because of all the oil revenue.
However they aren’t developed. I don’t know if it is because of corruption, political cronyism, or the fact that oil revenue destroys the incentives to create a long term, sustainable economy. Probably a combination.
At the same time nations that have few natural resources did become developed rapidly (going from impoverished to developed within 50 years) largely due to export based economies and eventually information based economies. Taiwan, South Korea, Singapore, Israel. Now nations like Vietnam & China are growing rapidly (by 2050 Vietnam’s economy will be bigger than Canada’s, while China will have a bigger economy than the US & EU combined). I think they are doing it the same way. Things like political stability, investments in health and education, fairly open markets and an export based economy all seem to be important.
Thirty to fifty years is a good estimate on a timeline. At 10% annual growth rate an economy doubles every 7 years, so it is 16x bigger after 28 years.
That’s debatable. According to the UN’s Human Development Index, all 3 countries you name are in the top band – “developed countries”: link.
There may be issues with wealth distribution, but that’s not the same thing.
In addition it tends to increase the value of a nation’s currency, making other exports less profitable.
Also as mentioned you really need some infrastructure in place (a decent, trading economy) otherwise a big oil find may just fund the bad guys.
They’re developed in the sense that they have superb infrastructure, solid central banking systems, and so on - but they’re hugely undeveloped in the sense of people.
Most of the Gulf states are just now getting to the point where universities are graduating significant numbers of students.
I recall reading somewhere that Saudi Arabia had a huge amount of graduates but that too big a percentage of them had degrees and higher degress in Islamic theology and the like, qualifications too esoteric to help long term development of the local economy.