Any Other Countries Moving Up In The World?

June 27, 2007 7:12 PM

Has any historically "Third World" country other than the Asian Tigers managed to approach "First World" standards of Quality of Life? Any nations poised for improvement in living standards that might put them there?

I've done a fair bit of reading about nascent industrial powerhouses like India, China and Brazil, but I was always curious about countries in say, the more stable areas of Latin America, Africa, and Middle East, areas that have investment and resources, that are actively building infrastructure and improving living standards. Are there any lesser-known nations that are actively climbing out of poverty, or have done so post-Cold War?

posted by StrikeTheViol to law & government (23 comments total)

Hm, a bit hard to make wide-ranging statements here.

There's this great online tool called the gapminder, which will show you how countries' development statistics, as measured by the UN, have changed over time compared to each other. For example, here's an awesome animated chart showing a relationship between life expectancy at birth and per capita income over the last 40 years or so; you'd be able to see countries literally "move up." Each country is a dot that's colored by continent/region and sized by population. You can select individual countries and watch the animation trace their trajectories, too. It's all very cool and very simple to tweak - there are other development characteristics you can check out too, like education, debt, and foreign investment.

From that, then, I'd say Costa Rica, Malaysia, and the UAE are some examples of places that fit your criteria, but those evolutions to development - which may or may not look like "first world" to you - have come over decades, not since the end of the Cold War. Also, keep in mind that places like Ireland and Spain have gone from being some of the poorest backwaters of Europe to some of the wealthiest places in the EU today, so being in the right neighborhood, shall we say, doesn't mean instant or even relatively quick development.

/amateur wonkery
posted by mdonley at 7:34 PM on June 27, 2007 [1 favorite]

The per-capita GDP of Chile is $12,700.
posted by Steven C. Den Beste at 7:42 PM on June 27, 2007

Agree with mdonley that it's hard to make wide-ranging statements. Depends on what you mean by 'actively climbing'. My suggestions: Most of Eastern Europe following the collapse of Communism. They weren't strictly third world, but have moved out of relative poverty. Earlier than the end of the Cold War: Spain after the end of fascism. Possible climb out of poverty: Mexico and Turkey.

Worth mentioning that standards of living in the Asian tigers (apart from South Korea) do not yet even come close to developed Western standards.

No country in Africa that I'm aware of is making that kind of progress, unfortunately.
posted by TrashyRambo at 7:52 PM on June 27, 2007

Also keep in mind that "quality of life" isn't just physical, material wealth, but education, health, security for the future, and the ability to use what you own/do as collateral to improve your life: access to credit is something we probably take for granted that many, many people in the world don't have.
posted by mdonley at 8:02 PM on June 27, 2007

Spain grew very quickly under Franco during the Spanish Miracle (1959-1973) with a compounded rate of 21 percent per anum. That might qualify for what you are looking for.

At the end of this period Spain was at 79% of EU average income, something that was only achieved 25 years later.
posted by sien at 8:18 PM on June 27, 2007

I venture to say that "credit" as Mdonley speaks of, is not a blessing for all... and is in place because a system that has been put into place were people feel they can not live within their means and achieve "happiness"


FYI - I have lots of CC debt. :(
posted by crewshell at 8:23 PM on June 27, 2007

great find, mdonley...I was thinking about Mexico and Turkey too, trashyrambo, and I hadn't heard about the Spanish Miracle at all. I said "post-cold-war" because I wanted to save the Marshall Plan and "Castro: Jesus Reborn, or Worse Than Stalin?" discussions for another time. That said, any anecdotes from well-traveled Mefites are welcome too. I had wondered about Chile and Argentina...just looking at statistics and bloggers, seems like they're doing better than some of Eastern Europe.
posted by StrikeTheViol at 9:10 PM on June 27, 2007

Crewshell - But access to credit, and not the bad kind like your credit card debt, is essential to an improved standard of living. Take home and car ownership for example: Even here in the States, when credit is not available to a person, your options are: 1) live with family and pool your resources, 2) live in a shack/tent/under a bridge, 3) Build your own home if you can find a piece of land that you can afford, 4) if such exists and you can make the rent, live in a rented place.

Even finding an available piece of land isn't the easiest thing if you have no credit and no savings with which to purchase it.

Our dependence on revolving credit and finance is absurdly unhealthy in the economic sense and will be the downfall of our economy in the face of increased competition from current so-called "third world" countries... especially China.
posted by SpecialK at 9:10 PM on June 27, 2007

I'd say Ireland is the best example, especially since it hasn't received its growth artificially, like by discovering some huge natural resources reserve.
posted by Space Coyote at 9:43 PM on June 27, 2007

Argentina was quite famously approaching the living standards of the United States, before the late 90s saw the beginning of their IMF-induced economic crisis.
posted by gaiamark at 4:12 AM on June 28, 2007

Space Coyote: huh, I'd always figured Ireland was a first-world country and always has been,

I'm from Malaysia and there have been great strides in the country in the past 10 years or so. The urban areas are developing very quickly and there is a growing "upper class" and "upper middle class" of sorts that are more affluent than their peers were 10 years ago. The Klang Valley in particular has become quite a hub for development - there's a shopping mall dedicated to luxury goods! Smaller cities like Petaling Jaya and Johor Bahru are also developing quickly.

Bangladesh is still very much "third world" but development in Dhaka is going very very fast. Again, shopping malls aplenty. It's still got plenty of work to do, but within 10 years I think we'll see a different Bangladesh than the common idea of "poor Asian country". My family is from there and I visit there often, and it's amazing how different it is (and yet how same it is, haha) everytime I go there.
posted by divabat at 6:37 AM on June 28, 2007

It very much depends on how you define "third world" - it's not a very useful term and quite difficult to pin down.

But for this I would second (Southern) Ireland, although its macroeconomic stats are skewed by multinational transfer pricing. Its progress, however, has been remarkable. From a peak in 1840s, its poulation declined to less than 50% over the next century, reducing its GDP. Following a negligent economic policy by the Westminster government, independence and then civil war during the 1920s, it had basically two remaining manufacturing industries: Guinness and Jacobs (a biscuit maker). Basically, Ireland missed the entire late-19th century demographic, social and manufacturing revolution in western Europe, and it didn't really begin its "1848" revolutionary era until the 1970s. What we see now in Ireland is effectively the same kind of economic boom that swept Britain during the early to mid 19th centuryn and central Europe during the mid to late 19th century.

During the 1930s it began an ill-advised trade war with its major trading partner, the UK. Following World War 2 (during which it had remained nominally neutral and refused post-war economic subsidies), its government maintained an agrarianist policy of discouraging foreign and manufacturing investment. By the 1960s, fully 80% of its coming-of-age cohort were emigrating because of abnormally high unemployment rates. During the 1970s, a series of dodgy governments managed to run its national debt up to a peak of 130% of its GNP. Finally in the 1980s foreign investment in manufacturing, coupled with a reduction in emigration and the entrance of females to the workplace led to a productivity boom. Also, the willingness of the EU to fund transport and infrastructure projects proved decisive - Ireland had not invested in transport plant since 1910 or so. When it finally joined the EU (then, EEC) its GDP was nominally below 50% of the average, now it's GDP is around 150% of the (higher) average. It's done well - in EU terms this is said to be a successful "convergence" (one of the aims of EU economic policy). However, Ireland is an outlier - it received large quantities of EU aid for far longer than most other countries, and it benefitted from a hugh influx of remittances from its Diaspora. It also benefitted from its geographic position. Other similar underdeveloped EU countries, such as Portugal and Greece, have not fared as well with EU membership.
posted by meehawl at 7:07 AM on June 28, 2007

Does Singapore count, or is it an "Asian Tiger"?
posted by chunking express at 7:36 AM on June 28, 2007

There is a big assumption in your question, and that is that poor nations, in "stable" (presumably in absence of war or extreme political unrest) situations, poor countries make some continual progress towards the goal of a higher living standard. This is a very common assumption, but it's not true. In order to understand how, why, when, and where improvements have been or are likely to be made, you also have to understand how and why progress has been lost in many places.

The big difference between the "Asian Giants" and, say, African countries is the conditions of international investment. The so-called giants were allowed to develop with certain trade barriers in place, which allowed the development of strong internal economies before they were fully exposed to the international economy (which is also how the "developed" nations did it).

African nations and most of the other "Third World" nations have been forced through Structural Adjustment Programs (SAPs) and through international trade policies to operate under "free market" conditions, which meant exposing their internal markets to international products that were sometimes subsidized (such as American rice) and sometimes simply cheaper because of the greater manufacturing capacities of the importing nations (Haiti, for example, was a self-sufficiently food producing nation before tariffs on rice were dropped and local producers were driven out of business by rice imported from subsidizing nations). This has served to gut many national economies. In addition SAPs required the gutting of public services such as education, health care, and infrastructure investment.

As a result, in countries like Ghana--which is politically fairly stable, committed to democracy, places a high value on things like entrepreneurship, trade, education and growth--the standard of living has decreased dramatically since independence 50 years ago. The number of people living in abject poverty is increasing, and so is the cost of school and health care.

In order to understand why things have worked out so differently, one has to look beyond the internal workings of any nation to the possibilities made available or unavailable in the context in which that nation is developing. I put forth that if a nation is barred from investing in the health and training of its workforce, barred from building public infrastructure, and barred from adjusting the price of imports or subsidizing local producers to make locally produced goods competitive with imports, then they are not going to develop the same standard of living as countries which are not barred from doing those things.

For what it's worth, my claim to knowing anything about this is a master's degree in International Development Studies and an in-progress PhD in anthropology focusing on Ghana. If you are interested I can recommend some reading.
posted by carmen at 8:03 AM on June 28, 2007

Argentina did start the century as being one of the 10 most prosperous countries in the world. It's decline relative to the rest of the world had been on and off, but constant. It has been undergoing very decent growth in the past few years however...

The IMF, unfortunately, did not induce, Argentina's financial crisis, Argentina itself did that. The IMF did exacerbate it by continuing loans that it knew that it could not repay.
posted by stratastar at 8:20 AM on June 28, 2007

European countries like Italy and Ireland used to be huge immigrant feeders to the US because of economic conditions there. Considering this, lasting development definitely seems possible.
posted by walla at 9:18 AM on June 28, 2007

meehawl: although I never considered Ireland underdeveloped, that's the most concise explanation I've seen of its recent economic history, thanks.

carmen: I understand and largely agree with your thesis... I'm looking for countries bucking those trends. Reading suggestions are welcome.
posted by StrikeTheViol at 10:45 AM on June 28, 2007

I want to second Carmen's point and add a second point. Capitalism isn't socialism and while there is no incentive for rich countries to build up and support poor countries (i.e. increase their standard of living), there are motives, intrinsic to capitalism, to sabotage and obstruct positive changes.

Capitalism requires a core-periphery relationship akin to the colonizer-colony relationship. While the latter can be imagined with the Congo and Belgium, the former is less about physical geography and more about control of capital, markets, and resources. And the core countries (e.g., the G-8 or so) can certainly share the spoils and cowrite the rules, if they;re still jockeying for position.

This isn't just a lefty tangent. Those countries that are promoted as attempting to jump from one side of the core-periphery divide are actually doing something more complicated: exacerbating the core-periphery divide internally (as opposed to attempting to raise the living standard for everyone). So local elites will have nice cars and perhaps be a slightly larger percentage of the population, but at the cost of damning the rest of the country to sweatshops and similarly exploitive employment. The exceptions to this currently are in countries that are damned by the dominant media in the core countries (think Venezuela), but the real exceptions will be made when we finally bring down capitalism once and for all.
posted by history is a weapon at 9:03 PM on June 28, 2007

That wouldn't have been a lefty tangent, history is a weapon, but you ended with "...when we finally bring down capitalism once and for all.", so it is. If you'd like to expand on the "we" part, tell me which socialist or near-socialist government by your definition is best developed today and why, China aside. Include views from opposing tendencies if possible.
posted by StrikeTheViol at 12:07 AM on June 29, 2007

Well, South Africa and Botswana have economies that are probably worth looking at. Southern Africa isn't really my area of expertise, but there's definitely stuff going on there. I met a (white) South African in Ghana last fall who insisted that South Africa is "a little United States." Obviously the gains there are pretty uneven, there's still a lot of terrible poverty, violence, and racism there. But the economy is strong.

There's not a lot of writing out there about countries bucking the trends that I know of, but Ferguson' Global Shadows is a pretty good collection of essays that look at how Africa fits into the global economy, and why investment there doesn't seem to have the same effects that it has had elsewhere.

It's old and maybe not directly related to your questions, but I think for putting both scholarship on internal economies and some of those economies themselves in perspective, nothing beats Poly Hill. I'd start with The Migrant Cocoa-farmers of Southern Ghana: A Study in Rural Capitalism. Hill was the first person to go and gather empirical evidence about how African economies actually worked. She found that, in Ghana anyway, colonial governments had little to do with the rapid rise and expansion of what became the world's largest cocoa industry. Historically, Ghana's economy and living conditions were a good example of what you're looking for, so it might be interesting to look at how that happened and why it reversed.
posted by carmen at 6:29 AM on June 29, 2007

carmen, funny you should mention Ghana - I lived there for a summer as a volunteer social studies teacher at Accra High School, and while there my mentor teacher insisted that at independence, Ghana was just as ready to develop as Malaysia, South Korea, and other smaller newly-independent places, but that, as you said, fluctuations in world prices for the commodity goods Ghana produced, like cocoa and gold, made it difficult to carry out the infrastructural changes needed to promote investment. Small world!
posted by mdonley at 7:00 AM on June 29, 2007

although I never considered Ireland underdeveloped

There's an interesting historical diversion in Mike Davis's recent Planet of Slums where he talks about the current and anticipated hypergrowth of megaslums in the 21st century. These cities, among them Lagos, Lima, Khartoum, Caracas, and a host of sub-Saharan sprawls, are currently undergoing a massive immigration from rural to urban areas of millions of people *without* any industries to pull them there. In other words, jobless growth. For economists, the existence of these "cities" is problematic because conventional urbanization theory says that people will migrate in search of better conditions, and the conditions within these jobless cities is so damn poor that most of them seem to exist on a daily average amount of money that falls below what anyone can measure as acceptable. Basically, in economic terms, they are black holes.

This kind of growth (by 2050 2 billion people in the "developing world" will live in slums made of mud and cheap metal siding) is unprecedented in history. All our ideas of hyper-growth megacities (London, New York, Manchester, Mogadissu, Detroit, Los Angeles) involve significant job-based pulls into the cities and rapid social mobility. Except, that is, for Dublin in the 19th century. In a country devoid of industry and beset by famine, with a declining population and continual low-grade civil disorder, Dublin's growth was astronomical until it eventually absorbed a third of the population of country. And most of these people moved to a city with no jobs, and found no jobs, and existed in one of the worse states of persistent urban poverty in the British Empire. For 19th century contemporaries, Dublin's poverty was considered on a par with Bombay/Mumbai, and legions of sociologists and economists wrote books about it - which Davis quotes at some length and contrasts with modern-day similar descriptions of daily life in 21st century slumopolises.

So if you want to see what the future could like like, and how some cities could in fact lift themselves out of extraordinary poverty and endemic corruption, look to Dublin.
posted by meehawl at 7:18 AM on June 29, 2007 [1 favorite]

For the edification of future Mefites, statistics seem to point to Mexico, Malaysia and Turkey as the top three in terms of modern infrastructure and living standards,
disregarding former Soviet states, which inherit their industries, and Brazil, India and China, which are all newly industrialized, but have a longer way to go.
posted by StrikeTheViol at 10:58 PM on July 12, 2007