October 18, 2000
Lee Kuan Yew, who turned a pestilential port called Singapore into a country with living standards to rival those of Europe, is warning leaders of developing nations against viewing debt relief as a panacea for faltering economies and also urging them to avoid the trap of development theories that are more ideological than practical, the New York Times reports (10/14, p. 1-4).
Lee, who now bears the title of senior minister for his country and next week opens a series of lectures by world leaders at Harvard, said that writing off or reducing the debt of developing nations -- a policy now supported by rich nations like the United States, Japan and many in Europe-- may only make nations look perennially uncreditworthy and unattractive to investors.
Too many third-world leaders, Lee said, had bought into fashionable theories of development that were more political than pragmatic. It happened, he said, in the first round of the post-colonial age, and it seems to be happening again. ''Third-world leaders become prisoners of contemporary ideas of the time,'' he said in the interview Wednesday. ''The first generation were greatly influenced by Nehru, Nasser, Tito, Sukarno -- and at that time they believed that the way to industrialize, the way to catch up with the West was to concentrate on heavy industry, state enterprises -- shortcut the whole process,'' Lee said. ''This was the result of the myth that the Soviet Union did it that way.''
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