Welcome to Hidden Rules of Development
Re-reading the development record through its anomalies.
Hidden Rules of Development is about the cases that do not fit. The development literature offers explanations for why some countries grow while others remain poor. Typically, this includes institutions, geography, capability, intent, donor architecture, and the policy framework of the moment. That view has been refined for forty years. The countries it describes do not always behave the way the framework predicts.
This publication is interested in the places where the framework is stretched and even breaks. A few countries transform when little in the standard explanation would have predicted it. Many more do not transform, even when the explanation suggests they should. The standard accounts can be modified to absorb each individual exception, but the exceptions accumulate. They have something in common. That something is what this Substack is seeking to identify.
The work here is organised into series. Each series takes one puzzle that the conventional development frameworks struggle with and works through the variable that seems to resolve it. The first series is on what I have come to call governing orientation.
The first series — Governing Orientation
In 2008 the World Bank’s Commission on Growth and Development, chaired by Michael Spence, identified thirteen economies that had sustained high growth long enough to genuinely transform their productive structure. The Commission catalogued the features that the thirteen shared: high savings and investment rates, openness to the global economy, macroeconomic stability, market allocation, and capable government. It also identified one feature that did not fit comfortably alongside the others: a credible commitment to growth by the leadership. The Commission described the feature. It did not explore what produced it, what made commitment credible rather than merely stated, or what distinguished the cases that demonstrated it from the cases that did not.
That is where this series picks up. Credible commitment is not a property that leadership can simply declare. It has to be demonstrated, and the cases the Commission identified did demonstrate it, in specific, observable ways that the report named but did not unpack. Each of the thirteen made costly choices that imposed real political costs on its own coalition for the sake of structural change rather than distribution. The choices preceded the institutions that the development literature now cites as the cause. That pattern is what I have come to call a developmental governing orientation: a government’s willingness to impose political costs in its own constituency for the sake of structural change rather than distribution.
Orientation is not the only reason countries develop. Geography, capability, institutional inheritance, and external circumstance all play meaningful roles. But orientation does work that the others do not. But on each of those dimensions, the thirteen are not consistently different from comparable countries that did not transform. Credible commitment is where the difference shows up, and orientation is what credible commitment looks like in operating practice.
The series uses the Commission's thirteen as its opening spine. It examines what credible commitment is required in each of those cases, and contrasts them with the comparable countries that did not transform: Egypt under Nasser, Bolivia after 1985, post-1994 South Africa, Ethiopia post-2012, and others. The series works through. Each of these had developmental ambition and many of the standard ingredients; what each lacked was the costly commitment the Commission named but did not develop. Each of these had developmental ambition and many of the standard ingredients; what each lacked was the costly commitment the Commission named but did not develop. The contrast is the most useful evidence the framework has.
The argument runs across a set of posts that build in sequence. China, Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore are considered in detail first. These are the cases where the costly founding choices are most legible and where the credible-commitment dimension is hardest to dispute — the reference points the framework is calibrated against.
Readers new to the argument benefit from reading them in order, but each is self-contained enough that the order is a guide rather than a requirement.
The posts in order
1. Only Thirteen Countries Have Ever Done It · The rarity that defines the puzzle. Why the Commission on Growth and Development’s count of thirteen sustained-transformation cases has not grown in the three decades since, and why the conventional explanations — institutional inheritance, geography, resource endowment, donor architecture — do not survive the cases that do transform.
2. The Necessary Orientation · What the missing variable is, and why it is not reducible to institutions, intent, or capability. Rwanda, France, Mexico, and South Africa make the case: governing orientation is constructed at the apex through specific political choices, and France’s state capacity does not produce what Rwanda’s does because the orientation does the work.
3. Built Against the Grain · How developmental orientation gets constructed when the existing political coalition resists it. Why is intent not the scarce resource, and why do governing coalitions that mean to transform usually not?
4. Development Intent Is Common. Orientation Is Rare · Which countries currently meet the orientation criterion, and what the near-miss cases reveal about the gap between intent and orientation. The fourteen, what each had to do to make it, and what the close cases are missing.
5. Before Strategy Comes Sacrifice: The Real Driver of Development · What Korea, Taiwan, and Singapore did before any of the institutions that explain them in the literature existed. The standard account has the sequence inverted: the costly founding choices preceded the institutional architecture that economists later cited as cause.
6. Transformation Takes More Than Ambition · What distinguished Egypt’s developmental ambition from China’s developmental orientation when both were stated and both were sincere. The three-part test that separates ambition from orientation operates on the founding moment itself, not on outcomes. Egypt fails the test where the costs fell, not where the ambition was set.
Where to start
If you are new to the argument, read posts 1 and 2 in order. They define the puzzle and name the variable. Post 5 (”Before Strategy Comes Sacrifice”) is the strongest standalone for readers who want a worked case before the framework.
If you read development economics already, post 3 (”Built Against the Grain”) is where the framework departs most clearly from the institutional-inheritance literature and from political-settlements theory. Post 6 is the most analytically dense entry and the cleanest engagement with the comparative cases.
If you want the cases first, posts 5 and 6. Korea, Taiwan, Singapore, China, and Egypt are the worked examples; the technical notes below carry the full evidence base.
Technical notes — deeper source material
Two longer pieces sit behind the series as reference pages. They do not email out, they are not part of the numbered sequence, and they are for readers who want the case evidence and the methodological responses at full depth.
Apex Commitment and Governing Circuit — Eight Cases carries the full case evidence base for the founding-moment commitments the series treats as the relevant variable. Eight cases were worked at a depth that the main posts’ compressed surveys could not sustain. It is the document on which the series’s empirical claims rest.
Architecture Before the Miracle: A Technical Note on Governing Orientation and Governing Circuits addresses the methodological objection that governing orientation is a retrospective description of successful economies rather than an identifiable prior condition. Carries the framework’s positioning against the developmental state literature, the institutional-inheritance literature, and political-settlements theory, as well as the formation-destruction asymmetry that runs across the confirmed and near-miss cases.
Neither is required reading. Both are available for readers who want to test the argument against the record.
What is coming next
The Governing Orientation series continues over the next few months.
The second group examined showed real growth without a fully developmental orientation in the same form. Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand each made costly choices, but the orientations in each were more partial, more contested, or differently structured than those in the canonical four. The series examines what made the commitment credible enough to sustain growth, while not enough to deliver the same kind of transformation.
A third group has begun to coast. Japan, Oman, and Botswana each transformed and then slowed — Japan from the 1990s, Oman as the oil-driven boom decades passed, Botswana more recently, as diamond-led growth has decelerated. The orientation question changes once the founding coalition is no longer in place and sustained growth has already been delivered.
Two more anomalous cases close the spine. Hong Kong and Malta are smaller economies, and in each, the development paradigm played out differently. The scale on which the framework's variables operate, the relationship between the governing coalition and the productive economy, and the disproportionate role of external trade and capital flows make these cases analytically distinct. For Hong Kong, status as a free port and entrepôt for trade with China shaped what the governing coalition had to commit to; for Malta, its position within Mediterranean trade routes and EU accession after 2004 made external integration the central productive choice.
A second series will follow, working on a different anomaly. The publication’s wider agenda is the cases that the standard development accounts struggle with. Governing orientation is the first variable I have worked through, not the last.
There is also a set of shorter weekly companion posts. Country case studies, glossary entries put in an operating context, and engagement with related arguments in the literature.
If the framing is useful, subscribing brings the next post to your inbox. Comments and pushback are welcome; the argument is most useful when it is most contested.