Thanks for the review I cant wait to get the book myself, but my issue is if these are the four examples, there's plenty to leave desired.
1) I am glad he mentioned Mauritius. Its a great study on manufacturing and I am glad he mentioned ethiopia on farming, great examples.
2) Botswana's success is less of institutions and more of the fact that it maintained its joint venture with de beers instead of nationalizing diamonds like Sierra Leone. De beers had a global monopoly until the US DOJ anti trust case in the 2000s. So unlike the rest of africa which had commodity prices busts in the 1980s and 1990s, botswana due to its dependence on the De Beers diamond cartel, was able to hoard diamonds to prevent a price bust collapse.
But now that de Beers lost its monopoly power and that synethetic diamonds from india and china have flooded the market, botswana is struggling now. Also botswana has tried to diversify to manufacturing many times, but south africa has sabotaged botswana's manufacturing capabilities with import quotas in their customs union. They also have some structural problems for manufacturing. Its certainly a success story by african standards, but with an asterisk.
3) You mentioned rwanda with minerals in congo so i wont continue on that. I hope he delved into how rwanda basically has a party-military fusion economy similar to taiwan back in the day.
But even then, Rwanda is still poorer than half of sub-saharan africa. Its per capita incomes matches its neighbors uganda which has 4x its population.
Its a little weird to use rwanda as an example when its still playing catch up growth with the rest of the continent post genocide.
Thanks Yaw, looking forward to reading your review. I agree with all your points. As a general point I think Studwell is weirdly allergic to doing quantitative comparisons (e.g., Rwanda's low base level of GDP, Mauritius's high one). A simple chart or table at the front would have cleared up a lot of issues.
I read How Asia Works and was pretty underwhelmed. The claims were sweeping and the evidence was scarce. There is quite a lot of self-congratulation for a theory that, while quite interesting, isn't close to being proven. In fairness to Studwell though, that's probably what you have to do though when you're writing a book like this. I do think that he underestimates the value of institutions, governance, and state capacity. Industrial policy is very vulnerable to elite capture; you need to have a lot of discipline to actually allow large firms to fail. And for all we know, east asian success could be due to this state capacity, not to industrial policy per se.
Thanks for the review I cant wait to get the book myself, but my issue is if these are the four examples, there's plenty to leave desired.
1) I am glad he mentioned Mauritius. Its a great study on manufacturing and I am glad he mentioned ethiopia on farming, great examples.
2) Botswana's success is less of institutions and more of the fact that it maintained its joint venture with de beers instead of nationalizing diamonds like Sierra Leone. De beers had a global monopoly until the US DOJ anti trust case in the 2000s. So unlike the rest of africa which had commodity prices busts in the 1980s and 1990s, botswana due to its dependence on the De Beers diamond cartel, was able to hoard diamonds to prevent a price bust collapse.
But now that de Beers lost its monopoly power and that synethetic diamonds from india and china have flooded the market, botswana is struggling now. Also botswana has tried to diversify to manufacturing many times, but south africa has sabotaged botswana's manufacturing capabilities with import quotas in their customs union. They also have some structural problems for manufacturing. Its certainly a success story by african standards, but with an asterisk.
3) You mentioned rwanda with minerals in congo so i wont continue on that. I hope he delved into how rwanda basically has a party-military fusion economy similar to taiwan back in the day.
But even then, Rwanda is still poorer than half of sub-saharan africa. Its per capita incomes matches its neighbors uganda which has 4x its population.
Its a little weird to use rwanda as an example when its still playing catch up growth with the rest of the continent post genocide.
Thanks Yaw, looking forward to reading your review. I agree with all your points. As a general point I think Studwell is weirdly allergic to doing quantitative comparisons (e.g., Rwanda's low base level of GDP, Mauritius's high one). A simple chart or table at the front would have cleared up a lot of issues.
Great review, thanks!
I read How Asia Works and was pretty underwhelmed. The claims were sweeping and the evidence was scarce. There is quite a lot of self-congratulation for a theory that, while quite interesting, isn't close to being proven. In fairness to Studwell though, that's probably what you have to do though when you're writing a book like this. I do think that he underestimates the value of institutions, governance, and state capacity. Industrial policy is very vulnerable to elite capture; you need to have a lot of discipline to actually allow large firms to fail. And for all we know, east asian success could be due to this state capacity, not to industrial policy per se.