By Mark Tran
June 29, 2011
Attend any aid or development conference and participants will invariably wax on about the importance of good governance, government accountability to citizens and uncorrupt rule as prerequisites to development.
Such talk was commonplace at the UN conference on least developed countries in Istanbul and the African Development Bank (AfDB) annual meeting in Lisbon, where there was much soul-searching at having failed to anticipate the Arab spring.
Anti-corruption, accountability and governance constitute the basic building blocks to development, according to the conventional wisdom. Yet, two countries that have made the greatest strides in poverty reduction can hardly be held up as models of good governance. In both cases, the governments are highly authoritarian – one-party rule – and accountability is limited.
The two countries that have won plenty of plaudits from the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank for lifting millions out of poverty are China and Vietnam. China lifted more than 600 million people out of poverty between 1981 and 2004. Vietnam has lifted about 35 million people out of poverty, its poverty rate has plummeted from 58% in 1993 to 14% in 2008 and it is well on its way to achieving middle-income status (defined by the World Bank as countries with a per capita income of $1,000).
China's success is even more stupendous. Using the poverty standard of a person living on $1.25 a day, the incidence of poverty in China declined from 85% in 1981 to 27% in 2004.
Granted, such success has had its downside, notably growing inequality and huge regional disparities, especially in China between the coastal regions and the interior. But there is no getting away from the overall impressive achievements of these two countries, where the communist party holds a monopoly of power and where dissidents such as Chinese artist Ai Weiwei are treated harshly.
Similarly, Ethiopia and Rwanda regularly win praise from Britain's Department for International Development (DfID) for their development efforts, but are hardly models of democracy and accountability.
So how do development experts explain how such "unsound" political practices – authoritarian rule, lack of political accountability and corruption – have resulted in impressive economic development? Dan Smith, the secretary general of International Alert, an independent peacebuilding group in London, who believes in the importance of governments building trust with their people to deal with challenges such as climate change, acknowledged the temptation to build simple narratives as a way of mobilising public opinion in the west in favour of development aid.
"We do need to focus on countries as they are," he told a seminar on delivering aid in fragile states, held in Westminster on Tuesday. Smith cited Turkey and South Korea as countries that combined development with authoritarian rule and managed to make the transition to democracy.
"Those countries had authoritarian governments, but they had a view of national wellbeing," said Smith. "There is a need for nuance, and there is no magic key for successful development."
Joanna Wheeler, a research fellow at the Institute of Development Studies in Sussex, who spoke about the importance of citizen participation at the grassroots levels through mechanisms such as local associations, said it was important to view development in broader terms than material consumption. For her, the key is that governments should be responsible to their citizens.
It could also be argued that the authoritarian model of development carries its own dangers, as the Arab spring has shown to dramatic effect. Officials at the AfDB have acknowledged they were too starry-eyed about headlines on strong economic growth and neglected problems such as income inequality that festered underneath the veneer of economic success.
No doubt the Chinese and Vietnamese authorities have taken on board the lessons from events in the Arab world and are thinking hard about "inclusive" growth. As Smith pointed out, Turkey and South Korea show that making the transition from top-down governments to regimes that are more accountable is possible, though undoubtedly difficult.
But in the meantime, the examples of Vietnam and China defy the current conventional wisdom about good governance as one of the preconditions of development. Corrupt and repressive regimes are not necessarily incompatible with lifting people out of poverty. It's an uncomfortable reality that does not fit well with the prevailing orthodoxy.
