What I’ve been reading

Pieces I’ve been reflecting on this month make analogous arguments from different angles: the standard toolkit of development economics looks shakier than the field is willing to admit. What’s left when you strip out the tools points somewhere uncomfortable — and, from a pro-growth perspective, clarifying.

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Has the manufacturing route closed?

Dani Rodrik’s How I Became a Manufacturing Skeptic is the most significant self-revision in mainstream development in years. Rodrik built more of the intellectual case for manufacturing-led growth as the replicable East Asian lesson than almost anyone else, and now argues it isn’t replicable. Even the most successful current industrialisers (Bangladesh, Vietnam, Cambodia) are absorbing far less labour into manufacturing than South Korea or Taiwan did at equivalent income levels. The escalator, he argues, has broken. He also appeared on the Ideas in Development podcast to discuss what services-led transformation would actually require — worth listening to alongside the piece.

Jostein Hauge’s Why the World Bank changed its mind on industrial policy registers a different part of the same problem. The Bank’s conversion to an industrial policy reflects geopolitical repositioning: Western states competing with China in semiconductors and EVs, not new evidence of development. The industrial policy being exported is designed for middle-income strategic competition, not for structural transformation from a low base. Importing the vocabulary while removing the conditions doesn’t transfer the lesson; it transfers the label. Ken Opalo has drawn out what this means for Africa specifically here — the risk that low-income economies adopt a policy framework calibrated for a stage of development they haven’t reached. (I’ve made a version of this argument here.)

Pietro Masina’s Petronas: The Exception That Could Not Be Repeated makes this concrete. Malaysia built a genuine developmental institution, but the conditions were constitutive: a specific political coalition, commodity rents at the right moment, bureaucratic insulation that proved unrepeatable. The lesson is about which conditions can be reproduced, not which interventions can. Copy the instrument; miss the point. I’ve written about the governing coalition behind Petronas here. The argument is that Malaysia’s orientation toward distributing resource rents into productive investment, rather than capturing them, is what gave Petronas its exceptional character and why that character didn’t transfer.

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Growth, evidence, and what the field won’t say out loud

Lant Pritchett’s Economic growth is enough makes an uncomfortable empirical case. Constructing a non-monetary composite of basic human wellbeing across 169 countries, he finds it correlates with GDP per capita at approximately 0.9. If that holds, the case for prioritising targeted programmes over market-enabling institutional reform rests on a far weaker foundation than the mainstream has assumed; resource allocation within the field may have been systematically wrong for decades. A companion visualisation piece makes the long-run growth facts hard to argue with.

Branko Milanovic’s International development: From moralizing to calculations to laissez-faire to rhetoric adds the structural explanation for why a finding like Pritchett’s hasn’t changed the field’s behaviour. Reviewing the history of development policy at the UN, he shows that each phase (basic needs, structural adjustment, human development, the current normative regime) was driven by the interests of powerful states rather than by evidence that prior frameworks had failed. The current “rhetoric” phase combines high normative ambition with almost no operational content and no accountability for delivery.

Together they make a challenging point for the field: development is calibrated around what is legible and fundable for donors, not around the market-enabling reforms and growth dynamics that actually produce what it claims to want.

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The constraint nobody in development wants to name

The Africatalyst piece on the ambition of African elites is direct in a way that most development writing avoids. African industrial transformation will not come from external capital or institutional blueprints. It requires domestic elites with the strategic orientation and risk appetite the task demands, and the current generation largely lacks these qualities. The argument is uncomfortable precisely because it doesn’t translate into a programme (but that does not diminish its relevance).

Ken Opalo’s Making lasting peace in the Sahel makes the same point in a different register. The Sahel now accounts for half of global terror deaths. Military and technological responses cannot substitute for the elite bargains that give armed factions a stake in stability; without those bargains, security operations produce temporary displacement rather than durable peace. The limiting factor is not operational. It is political: who has an interest in what gets built, and whether that interest runs toward creating conditions for productive private activity rather than capturing what already exists.

Both pieces point to the same constraint: not technical, not financial, not even institutional in the conventional sense, but about the orientation of the people at the top of the domestic political economy. That is more challenging terrain than development writing usually occupies.

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The implicit argument running across all three sections is that development organisations are several steps removed from their own stated objectives. If the manufacturing route is narrowing, if targeted programmes are weaker than the growth-wellbeing correlation implies, and if the real constraint is whether domestic elites will create the conditions for markets and productive investment to take hold, then most of what the field does addresses secondary variables at best. The field knows this, as people in all fields know things they cannot act on institutionally. The interesting question is not whether the diagnosis is correct but who is positioned to make it matter.