Ethiopia is now Africa's fastest growing economy
phillytrib.com
phillytrib.com
Most of the large construction projects are run by Chinese companies, especially the Chinese State Construction Corp. New airport terminal, ministries, hotels, convention center, light rail, and so on. This has caused some discussion around Chinese taking construction jobs etc. You'll see these state-funded Chinese construction projects in pretty much every African country.
Although Addis is booming, the population still primarily lives in the countryside, and their quality of life is a lot lower. It's misleading to look at average income across the entire population because the city's economy is so far ahead of the rest of the country. This has probably contributed to some of the unrest.
Interesting enough the construction sites contain none of these tools (the Chinese workers don't use them), and the locals now can't afford to bring them on a special order because they're either locked out of the market or many more times expensive than before due to the trade deal. Crappy state run industries just keep on trucking at the expense of the locals in Africa.
You've described free trade in a nutshell. More industrialized nations love these kinds of trade policies.
These countries are then dependent upon the US for staple crops. And when international prices for staples rise relative to exports, then their citizens are the first in line to starve, as the aid is conveniently just enough to eliminate domestic industries but not enough to feed everyone. See: Mexican Tortilla Riots & Arab Spring.
You say that as if your country's values are static. Any possible reading of history could not honestly conclude that. I'm not singling out your country by the way. But by way of a single example, look at your (and my) country's treatment of refugees and immigrants. No one is calling to "bring me your huddled masses". My country's (Australia) refugee policy definitely has an explicitly malicious intent - the use of indefinite detention against non-criminals in order to deter others.
Values change. Also, values are not a monolith. They are a spectrum. In some areas, the value gaps are definitely closing.
History ain't done yet.
Canada and the US have very healthy activity in cross border free trade, but I'm unable to tell which of those two countries is the aggressor and which the victim.
If Canada is the victim, then woe is poor China and Germany. Must suck to have the world's largest economy devouring your exports.
Oh, and as soon as Canada had a competitive product in the aerospace industry (from Bombardier), the United States government slapped the company with a 200% import tariff. And here I thought that free trade benefits all parties...
If Ethopia by some miracle became a leading auto manufacturer, I assure you, the free trade rhetoric would find some way to protect GM, Chrystler-Fiat, and Ford from it. The United States is not interested in being a resource economy, with value-added industry happening somewhere else.
The bigger question is if they will have an export surplus to china which is neccessary to repay the loans. This is how china paid back it's loans.
It makes me wonder about corresponding relationships between the parent's description and this, if any. (Not that I haven't already been wondering; it reminds me of this.)
This is straight out of the Potato Famine. :(
while everyone should acknowledge the degree of poverty that is still rampant in countries like Ethiopia, that image is not particularly well suited to make a point.
It can be true that at the same time that Ethiopian farmers sell produce to Europe, while people from somewhere else try to alleviate poverty in the country.
It would not make sense for farmers in Ethiopia to stop trading food with the world at large just because people in the country are hungry. In fact, depending on whatever economic transaction is going on, the food coming in might be significantly cheaper than the food going out. Trade and reducing poverty or hunger are not at odds.
The goal should be to generate better incomes and social services for poor Ethiopians, not stopping businesses from trading with Ethiopia globally.
It's true that individuals are all acting rationally, and that imposing limits on exports would not be a panacea. However, at the most basic level, it is monstrous that food exports are happening in the context of local starvation. The rationality of the outcome within capitalism shouldn't blind us to the absurdity of the outcome itself.
There's really no way to stop this other than to outlaw all exports of food while starting to centrally distribute food in Ethiopia. This is neither productive nor would it reduce the amount of starving people in Ethiopia. In fact, it would increase the amount of poverty.
There are certainly poor people who have trouble affording basic goods in California. Still the solution is not to stop all exports of goods from California to Washington and vice versa. This would just make everybody worse off.
The point of the original post is that those "independent actors" are not "independents", not from Ethiopia.
To turn this back to software, I am strongly reminded of Joel Spolsky’s discussion of when and what to outsource:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-...
“If it’s a core business function — do it yourself, no matter what.”
- "the only alternative is this particular strawman policy, which would make things worse"
- "there's nothing absurd about people starving due to preventable causes"
This is only absurd if you consider the nation-state to be the fundamental unit of mutual aid.
If you consider a different division of population - the corporation, or the city-state, or the tribe, or the individual, for example - it makes perfect sense. Even before "monstrous" capitalism, you'd get plenty of situations where one tribe would actively pillage the farms of a neighboring tribe - food "exports" and local starvation.
You might argue that this is monstrous as well, and I'd even agree with you, but that's an argument against being shitty to your fellow human beings, and not specifically against capitalism. Capitalism is just yet another definition of "tribe", where the corporation that employs you is the tribe that you owe allegiance to, damn all the other tribes.
The path followed for development by the developed nations have nothing to do with the path they (we?) recommend to underdeveloped nations.
Capitalism really doesn't have anything to do with tribalism though. Workers don't have any allegiance whatsoever to their employer beyond that dictated by the imperative of not starving to death. The structural constraint under critique is the one where capital seeks to maximize profits regardless of the human cost. So, when a grower exports food for money instead of giving it to starving people for free, that's what I'm talking about.
At least one party in the food market isn't acting rationally. The situation where food is produced in Ethiopia for consumption in Europe and food is produced in Europe for consumption in Ethiopia could equivalently be solved by keeping the food in its country of origin and everyone saves on transport costs.
But maybe the Ethiopian "food" was just something like coffee beans which can't really feed a population, in which case there also isn't any problem with exporting them.
Both Ethiopia and Europe would be worse off for your plan. Ethiopia because instead of the profit from coffee they subsistence farm something that doesn't grow as well. Europe because they don't have coffee and they get even more of the crops they already grow too much of.
Now some have pointed out that the profit from Ethiopian coffee might not got to Ethiopia. That might be true (I don't know), but even if so, Ethiopia retains more money than if they quit exporting coffee and the profits.
Unfortunately, it also puts it at the mercy of forex rates, collapse of their monoculture, food shortages in other parts of the world causing rising food prices, any disruptions in foreign trade... Any of those things go south, and now you have millions of starving people. Sitting on a pile of coffee beans.
Why do you think the US government pushes billions of dollars into agriculture subsidies? Wouldn't it be so much cheaper if it just imported all of its food from abroad - where farmers get paid ~$1/day, instead of $6/hour.
There's a simple reason - it's because it doesn't want food riots, caused by some factor outside of their control. Nothing brings about regime change faster then the price of bread. [1] No well-ran country wants to be dependent on food, or oil imports.
Ironically, these same agriculture subsidies are what cripples agriculture in other nations - they can't always compete with Uncle Sam's subsidies.
[1] Just ask Mubarak. Or the Romanovs.
These things became more common in the modern world because transport costs fell so low that it doesn't matter in most cases.
Actually I believe that for a country rich in cash crop potential, some form of communism might actually be not so bad (e.g. free market with a strong legal bias favoring the formation of co-ops in agriculture). Certainly not worse than an economy dominated by a few plantation lords (doubly so if those are foreign entities), if that's the only alternative. I wouldn't suggest anything for Ethiopia though, wouldn't suggest anything, just too dang little knowledge about the place (and my personal threshold for feeling comfortable with playing armchair president is embarrassingly low).
The international community / western marketplace obliterates any country that dares expropriate / nationalize the lands of the (white colonialist) landholding class.
Just look at how the West has cut off Cuba and Venezuela.
The US cut off Cuba, but even with US retaliatory sanctions much of the rest of the West did not.
It defies the "african countries are poor only due to the oppressive white colonialism" narrative.
EDIT: As for Venezuela, 1 USD was ~6-7 Venezuelan bolívars in 2013.
Last time I checked it was roughly 1,100,000. A staggering 180 000 times drop in only 5 years.
External political climate remained roughly the same in that time span.
But what happens most of the time in these unstable African governments is that they gravitate from one extreme to another: Either they enforce zero workers rights and exert very little control over foreign investors - allowing them to pay bribes to individuals rather than taxes which would benefit state run institutions. Or they nationalize every last farm and shop in the country, scaring away foreign investment and know-how and end up with lower productivity and mismanagement of local industries.
And if toxic investors are clever, they might even support every major candidate a little: they have already reached their goal if the eventual winner believes that his secret supporter was acting as kingmaker. Might be much cheaper in total than actually forcing a result with money.
It is mentioned multiple times in the movie, and in these comments, that it is not Ethiopian farmers those who trade with anyone. Foreign corporations on incognito or behind domestic providers are those who suck money out of a poor country presumably without or with astonishingly weak trade legislature. More strikingly, doing so at the cost of famine of the blatantly low paid workers while violating not only ethics but also human rights of those exploited humans.
If those corporations were so savvy investors they would make profit at home under well ordered trade system.
This is a statement that is not necessarily true on its face.
When the country's currency is gradually inflated away to worthlessness [1] and economic prospects are limited for non-landowning classes of people, trade and reducing poverty can indeed be at odds. You need only look at history [2] to see the real effect imperialist export policies can have on a population.
1. https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=ETB&view=10Y 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
To get some real insight into this we'd need to find out what goes wrong when that last step doesn't happen.
The country of Ethiopia is not one collective organization but made up of individuals. The enclosure of resources for individuals allow independent trade and returns, meaning that gains are not distributed across society but held by the individual.
It is the same system everywhere.
Why are schools underfunded? Why are homeless shelters underfunded? Why are food banks underfunded?
Productivity is best held in individual hands. Taxation is the best mechanism to distribute wealth. However the taxes go through political hands and is thus corruptible.
Seems like an individual with too much money is just as corruptable.
But I’m pretty sure this is the entire purpose of the World Bank. Scam weak nations out of their resources and give them to extranational corporations.
I think they have a “do good” arm but the “extricate resources” arm has final say. If the do good arm ever, say, started returning large amounts of productive land to indigenous farmers, that program would be quietly killed.
The net effect of the do good arm is then just PR for the extricating of resources.
In Ethiopia they are starting with advanced agriculture, and the World Bank is critical in jump starting that process. Foreign companies need to participate in a local economy when there are no local alternatives.
The people don't get the food produced on their farms because they can't afford the food. They can't afford it because the Ethiopian economy is in its infancy. Sure it doesn't feel right when the food is being shipped out of the country, but that's how capitalism works.
If Ethiopia plays by the rules of the game for the next few decades then their economy will grow the problems we see in today's Ethiopia will be diminished.
Starting this process is the purpose of the World Bank.
Maybe there's a better way without inherent suffering?
>If Ethiopia plays by the rules of the game for the next few decades then their economy will grow the problems we see in today's Ethiopia will be diminished.
If someone came to you with this proposition, that your region would grow in a few decades (maybe in time for your grandchildren to benefit) while you watch your neighbors starve and the profits and food from your countries land is shipped overseas for the majority of your adult life, I hope you would do the sane thing and tell that person to fuck off.
The "rules of the game" are "get yours, and get it now by whatever means capable", which is what countries with capability do and will continue to do. If their actions result in any benefit to the world outside their borders, it is incidental.
So people starve because they cannot afford to eat the food that they farm. If that's how capitalism works then maybe capitalism needs some adjustments.
Law, order and prudent fiscal/monetary policy are all it takes. If Ethiopia can guarantee these things then the international community of capitalism will reward it and its citizens will reap the rewards.
Using the same logic, Western countries tried to colonize Russia in 1919 and Nazi Germany colonized quite a bit of Europe during WWII.
An assertion about "Africa" is like an assertion about "Asia", which includes everything from Russia to Thailand to India to China to Turkmenistan to Iran to Japan to North Korea. There are few assertions one can make about all of Africa, which covers Egypt to Morocco to South Africa to Kenya to Liberia to Madagascar, and so much in between.
> the only continent that produces what it doesn't need but imports all that it needs
That's normal trade behavior. You produce things in which you have comparative advantage, then trade them for things that others produce more efficiently.
France produces far more wine than it needs and Japan produces far more cars than it needs because both are great at making those things. Then they trade; resources are used most efficiently, because both are more efficient at producing their specialty; and consumers get the best products in the world. You get more for less. Otherwise you'd have lots of Japanese wine and French cars.
But are the people employed, at what is admittedly low wages, better off than the alternative?
And if we in the EU pressure for fair wages, then might this not be better than nothing?
How do the foreign companies grow produce ? Do they employ local people ?
From examples of India I personally feel the real issue here is the inability of the country to clearly enforce property rights and especially for poor and tribal people. (Tribal people might be better off selling off land to richer corporation and working in those fields as an employee)
1. Ethiopia's GDP per capita is ~$700 USD, so this growth is from a very low base.
2. Total fertility rate is 4.28. Compare this to China at 1.57 and USA at 1.84. This means that some of the growth just goes to supporting a larger population.
3. I have read elsewhere that you need government connections and a lot of money to do business in Ethiopia. So the benefits of this growth might not be as broad as they otherwise could be.
Here are some old figures:
https://tradingeconomics.com/ethiopia/gdp-per-capita-growth-...
In that year, GDP growth was 7.5%, but per-capita GDP growth was 4.9%. I could have some gaps in my knowledge of the meanings in these figures, but I think the difference roughly equates to what you speculate - that population growth eats some of the economic growth when viewed from the perspective of the individual.
Also important to note, I think that these are nominal, not real figures. So right now, I think we would reasonably expect sub-5% real per-capita growth. Even correcting for that I'm sure it's an astounding pace of improvement. It's hard to wrap your head around multi-year improvements in quality of life of that scale.
But there's a depressing side, that maybe some nations are actually contracting in per-capita real GDP.
They have 15% annual inflation.
But there's a depressing side, that maybe
some nations are actually contracting in
per-capita real GDP.
It all depends on whether you have sustained growth, but that's where China started roughly 3 decades ago: https://tradingeconomics.com/china/gdp-per-capita.
I think Ethiopia has some really tough challenges ahead of it, but it will obviously be good for them and good for Africa if they can make it work.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Ethiopian_Renaissance_Da...
Is this really that new? Has damming technology only recently made these issues relevant?
According to the UN, this is very old, citing a water treaty from 2500BC on the Tigris.
I would initially guess it's a problem now for the rivers you mention because only now do these places have the capital & use for a dam.
And, really, fights over water never end. It's a difficult good- vital to life, inexpensive to divert, and yet both limited & temporal in supply, & difficult to relocate. Additionally, the source is frequently within another state or country. No one has been terribly successful yet in implementing water markets, and no one has conjured a perfect way to apportion water rights- with right of first use & riparian rights both having obvious flaws.
Crazy things happen with water. For example, where I live I am not allowed to capture the water that falls on my own property. It's owned by someone else, and I can be prosecuted for capturing it (with a loophole for garden rainbarrels)
1. True, but not radically different from the rest of Africa. Further the PPP figure is about $1700, which is a bit more indicative of purchasing power / standard of wealth. 10% growth in Ethiopia may not be as impressive as say China growing 10%, but it's still 10% growth that few African countries can match consistently. Having $170 extra can mean better nutrition, a cellphone, a bicycle, communal investments etc. Moreover, it shows good prospects and stability, the type of conditions necessary to attract FDI and cheap borrowing rates going into the future.
2. Not really. Fertility rates tend to have a strong negative relationship with wealth. The best thing you can do to reduce fertility rates is improve economic prospects in a country. Populations aren't growing because fertility rates, they're going down. Populations are growing because general healthcare and life expectancy has improved radically in the past 50 years or so.
3. That's the case all over Africa, but rising tides lift all boats at least to some extent. I mean, take a look at South Korea. It had a dictatorship until the 80s and was extremely corrupt, we still see high-profile cases of corruption (right to the 43rd prime minister resigning on corruption charges in 2016). Corruption is obviously not desirable and indeed distributions benefits unevenly, but there are many countries (like Korea) which have a history of high-corruption and rapidly growing socioeconomic conditions of ordinary citizens.
2. I agree that TFR declines with wealth, but it is still true that if your population is growing your economy has to grow faster to compensate for it. I am not sure how quickly TFR falls as the economy grows. If it lags significantly this will still have an effect.
3. This one is trickier. There are large differences between the poor African countries and the previously poor Asian countries. The authoritarian governments in South Korea, Taiwan, and China actually helped these countries get out of poverty because they could enforce policies that otherwise would not be popular, like redistribution of land to peasants and protecting infant industries from foreign competition while they developed. Japan was a little different (actually so was China) but had similar policies. These policies are not being implemented in Africa.
The corruption in Asia and the corruption in Africa are also of a different kind. South Korea allowed some corruption as long as the managers of the companies involved where able to produce globally competitive products. In Africa the corruption has largely enriched a small number of well connected people while doing nothing to help the local population. I am not sure how corrupt Ethiopia is.
Either way, I wasn't talking about corruption as much as the difficulty of doing business in Ethiopia, which seems to be difficult if you do not already have money and connections, which suggests that the benefits of economic growth will be more concentrated than they otherwise could be and they have in the Asian countries that successfully emerged from poverty.
Africa has had 50 years to adopt better policies, but instead we see frequent civil wars, endemic corruption, and poor governance. These problems aren't insurmountable, but they are large.
>>" The authoritarian governments in South Korea, Taiwan, and China actually helped these countries get out of poverty because they could enforce policies that otherwise would not be popular, like redistribution of land to peasants and protecting infant industries from foreign competition while they developed."
Those are not popular policies? do you mean popular for the IMF and the World bank or what?
You're probably right that sometimes there is popular support for these policies but it's hard to get them in place.
It's great to see economic cooperation working out so well on so many levels!
Yes, Chinese contractors are having a big boom (banks, stadiums, airports & roads)
There's a shortage of foreign currency due to the mega projects underway - medicine, electronics, car prices have nearly doubled
What about salaries? Is the net result positive for you?
Could you elaborate? How is there a shortage if there's a ton of foreign investment coming in?
Same issue that all booming cities face, whether it is New York, San Francisco, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, or anywhere else.
Some manage it better than others.
Beside there is a deficit between export and import leading to currency shortage.
https://www.reuters.com/article/ethiopia-energy-idUSL6N0N91Q...
The fact that they're a strong economy with a strong military and have a government wary of imperialism bodes well, as long as the can keep the number of revolutions and civil conflicts low. Stability is the key.
The continent of Africa remains the last frontier in outsourcing manufacturing, but right now it's not competitive: transport costs are high, there are issues with utilities, capricious governments, and no established concentration of expertise. The Chinese involvement is working hard on improving these for other reasons, but ironically it may enable Ethiopia to begin to take on roles that China has now in the global supply chain. It may also be deliberate: during a gold rush, most money was made by those who enabled the prospectors, not the prospectors themselves.
China will cause the country to become indebted to it and when they can't make the repayments offer to helpfully take full control of it.
More broadly, taking on debt to build the infrastructure needed to level up industrial capabilities isn't exploitation. Building better energy grids, transportation, and communication infrastructure is expensive. It's fundamentally no different than software startups taking on fundraising rounds to enable growth. As long as the leadership isn't irresponsible about it, there's nothing wrong with it and it should easily pay for itself.
The important thing for debt-for-infrastructure planning is to keep corruption manageable, so you don't wind up borrowing to build boondoggles that are for the personal enrichment of the the well-connected rather than the good of the country.
At any rate, China is no more predatory in this regard than the IMF, the World Bank, or other western financial institutions. They have a surplus of capital and need to invest it somewhere. The goal is not imperialist, but rather capitalist.
Yes it's exactly/similar behaviour to the IMF. Doesn't make a difference though to the people.
Is Ethiopia in a lot of debt trouble? From [1], figure 1.17, doesn't seem too troubling, especially when considering its growth rate.
Your assertion that China plans to overload countries with debt also seem to be based on the heavily promoted Sri Lanka story while ignoring any other data points. The Center for Growth Development has a report, [2], Examining the Debt Implications of the Belt and Road Initiative from a Policy Perspective. They find that for the 68 countries analyzed, only 8 are at risk. Your story also contradicts the many times China has provided debt relief.
> In countries suffering from debt distress, the Chinese government has provided debt relief in an ad hoc, case-by-case manner [...] The IMF estimates that China has delivered over 80 percent of what it is expected to provide under HIPC. It was a creditor to 31 of the 36 HIPC countries, and the most recent publicly available information indicates that it provided relief in at least 28 of them, including 100 percent forgiveness for several (e.g., Burundi, Afghanistan, and Guinea). […] China has also demonstrated a willingness to provide additional credit so a borrower can avoid default. A prominent example is China's agreement in early 2017 to extend an RMB 15 billion swap line to Mongolia for three years in support of an IMF Extended Fund Facility.
[1] African Economic outlook: https://www.afdb.org/en/knowledge/publications/african-econo...
[2] PDF Warning: https://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/examining-debt-imp...
You honestly can't tell me you don't see that as a loaded statement...And based on your replies to other commentators, doesn't seem like you intended that either.
It has a little graphic showing China owning Pakistan, Kenya, Djibouti, Myanmar and Sri Lanka.
A family member on a recent flight between Chad and Addis Abeba told me that 85% of passengers on the flight were Chinese.
Contractors and private companies are just tip of iceberg. A lot of hi level government cooperations , government sponsored think tank activities[1] which might play a more important role than private business activities. Chinese are coaching Ethiopia to build a nation.
It's the same journey that China itself experienced for last 30 years. The nation building expertise partially comes from tons of competing local government policy makers fighting for the prosperity of their home cities on the vast experiment field of 1.3 billion people, but in early years of struggle also from Hongkong,Taiwan entrepreneurs and even a foreign government with their management expertise when China was as poor as many Africa countries and with no expertise. During the time (in 1996) I created the first web site for CS-SIP[2], I witnessed local Chinese government officials learned from Singapore coaches like pupils.
Why Ethiopia? Because although it's a democracy but the Ethiopian political ecosystem is closer to an "Orwellian regime" that makes building nation possible. It's totally not because Chinese particularly like a regime. Actually Chinese are ideology agnostic and pragmatic. Chinese have a better understanding that this kind of "oppressive" governance creates less chaos. For example Chinese construction contractors almost always hire Chinese worker from China. The real reason is those are the only qualified teams[3] be able to get the job done. However in a democratic countries some sponsored NGO and activists will speak out the "true" that Chinese companies have job discrimination against local people. Then there are massive protests by local people Th Projects can not continue. These incidents happened many times in non-regime countries.
Why quite? Isn't nation building expertise is more valuable and worth to promote than business building expertise so larger population can benefit from? There are a couple of reasons:
1.Western journalists are almost all belief driven people with a little different mindset of HN readers with proof driven thinking. Most of them are activists in the guise Journalist who want to promote their own ideology. They mentally deny the real cause of fast growth in Ethiopia because both governments are regimes so they unintentional hide the truth.
2.Chinese government don't want to be to visible so the nation building is less likely to be interrupted. The international community won't see Chinese effort as an mutual beneficial economic activity but as an expansion to gain regional influence like Soviet Union or Iran because international community is largely brain washed by Orwell's works like 1984 which used to be valid many years ago and still valuable but not applicable everywhere any more.
[1]I have a old friend did consulting job helping policy making for Ethiopia
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzhou_Industrial_Park
[3] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/968608879914270721?lang=...
Would anybody have any resources or direction to point me to?
Or these? https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/011316/afk-e...
I expect you would find that the biggest companies in most of Africa are either state owned mining and oil companies or western companies operating in Africa. I don't think they have many important publicly traded companies because their financial systems aren't well developed.
The three big ones there actually have a respectable amount of listings (Egypt 833, South Africa 402, Nigeria 223)
Obviously financial infrastructure varies a lot from country to country
Wow. I'm speechless - how did you arrive at that (incorrect) conclusion? Not only are there plenty of African stock exchanges[1], a lot of publicly traded companies opt to be (dually or exclusively) listed on foreign bourses.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African_stock_exchange...
There's a Ryan Hoover (not the Product Hunt founder) that blogs about how to open a brokerage account as a foreigner in order to buy stocks in different countries:
Assuming this was fixed, though, I would recommend looking into infrastructure and technology products and services, especially those that are homegrown. These are what most countries need the most and the potential for their growth would be tremendous given the continent's population size.
infrastructure in africa is weird though, most of it goes from the resource rich lands to some port for export.
There is very little infrastructure between african nations in comparison, which hurts inter-african trade a lot, because it usually results in exporting to other countries being cheaper and using the resources to grow the trade between african nations.
Having an internal market (like the EU common market) allows for massive growth of the economies of different nations, it's a shame infrastructure for it does not exist (yet).
Again, it comes to leadership. Rwanda, as an example, has great business legislation but being a small, landlocked country it will be reliant on good legislation from its neighbours too in order to really blossom, and sadly this is largely missing.
i ask because one of the issues that india's legislators have is to create policies which can intelligently regulate a largely off-the-books economy. the results end up looking stupid and not being effective a lot of the time.
When the government's legislation is sometimes actively against your welfare as a citizen, I imagine you're much more likely to have off-the-books and informal business. Again, the lack of infrastructure in many places requires citizens to work around these problems and the larger sense of community in most African cultures also makes an informal economy more likely.
These are just anecdotal opinions, though, so take it with a large pinch of salt.
[0] https://www.sweetmarias.com/green-coffee/africa-arabia/ethio...
Do you know what is happening in Iran these past few weeks? And I say this as an Israeli, whom Iran has already threatened to destroy. I understand their position. Moreso if you consider which two countries border Iran to the east and to the west, and what has happened in those two countries not long after the turn of the millennium.
Don't get me wrong, I realize that Europe, Israel, and the US are better off with a non-nuclear Iran. But having seen Libya and Ukraine, I completely understand the Iranian position.
"Wouldn't it be rational for Iran – geographically encircled, politically isolated, feeling threatened – to want its own arsenal of nukes, for defensive and deterrent purposes?" Pointing out the difference between America, and its allies, going to "war with non-nuclear Iraq" and their "diplomacy with nuclear-armed North Korea", Hasan concluded: "The simple fact is there is no alternative to diplomacy, no matter how truculent or paranoid the leaders of Iran might seem to western eyes." [0]
As for the OP's question... it was a dictatorship for 40 years driven not by good governance but by oil money. You either have a dictatorship that builds very strong institutions for a post-dictator rule, or you don't. And particularly the oil-dependent states forgo building the right institutions, because an oil-rich country doesn't need them. Without institutions and civil society a dictatorship erupts into chaos after the dictator dies, particularly if it happens abruptly.
In terms of institutions and governance Libya was far from the jewel of Africa. It was never designed to last. It's more akin to someone living on creditcard debt for a few years before it all comes crashing down.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/nov/17/iran-w...
In other words, the actual people who built the missiles would simply swap out an electronic control component to acquire operation control of the devices. These are the same people who voted >90% for Ukrainian independence and who distrusted the other large USSR successor state, Russia.
Long story short, "death to FOO" is apparently an idiomatic phrase in Iran, especially in a political context, going back to the early 20th century. From http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=31116
The phrase became popular during the Persian Constitutional
Revolution (1905-1911), when political activists would chant
"zende ba ___" ("long live ___") in support of a policy or
leader, or "marg bar ___" in opposition. These two phrases
became entrenched within Iranian political discourse, and
during the Iranian Revolution of 1979, swarms of protestors
took to the streets chanting "marg bar Shah" to express
their dissatisfaction with Iran's monarchy. "Marg bar ___"
and "zende ba ___" have continued to live on as colloquial
phrases incorporated into political chants, and they have
been appropriated to express opposition to or support for
any number of subjects.
I mention this because in American English "destroy" is a very strong literal term unless there's obvious sarcasm. Going back and parsing several infamous Iranian statements (official, or made by leaders)--"death to", "wiping Israel off the map", etc--I think it's fair to say that one could reasonably construe those statements as deliberately worded to refer to the Israeli political state. Of course, what Iran has said and what it has done (e.g. support terrorism) are quite different things. And destroying the political state vs the population is arguably a distinction without a difference as a practical matter. But in as much as Americans and Israelis believe that because of the seemingly common, blunt language that Iranians en mass wish to see the U.S. and even Israel literally destroyed, I think there's some unfair, possibly willful misinterpretation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
I'm hopeful for Ethiopia that their economy being much more diverse (especially once the hydroelectric dam comes online), their economy will prove more resiliant
If you are told the percentage increase, check the absolute increase;
Aaaaand if you are told the absolute increase, check the percentage increase!
"Ethiopia hailed as 'African lion' with fastest creation of millionaires" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/04/ethiopia-faste...
Ethiopia is not an easy place to travel. People are friendly but reserved. English it not very common there. They are not the African "buddy" type of people (ey man, lets have a beer!). If you are into adventure, go to the Bale mountains and take a three day horse ride expedition and try to see the Ethiopian fox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_wolf Or take a two week expedition on horsed to see the Ethiopian lions (unfortunately longer that my ass can sustain on a horse). AFAIK the only lions that live in the jungle. It is a rough place. I like it. Possibly love it, but Ethiopia is not for everyone.
Addis has two major museums. If you want to see Lucy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(Australopithecus) make sure you go to the right one.
If anyone is interested in importing ore, please ask me. My Ethiopian friends are always nagging me for business contacts.
I think you're confusing Africans with Jamaicans or some other black stereotype.
But try to see the difference between welcoming Uganda (based on a statistic they are the most welcoming nation to foreigners) and Ethiopians. Yet, they are nearly neighbors.
I don't dislike that the Ethiopians are reserved. What did one of the rangers tell me? We are dirty. We don't have showers. We don't have washing machines. We are dirty. But we know that we are dirty. We are dirty but not stupid!
How to shoot an Ethiopian? Aim 1 meter above his hear. You have to hit his ego!
Yes, they are a special kind of people and they take proud in it. If they ever throw me out of my current home, Ethiopia may be, besides Colombia, my second destination. It is happening there!
I fell in love with Brazil many years ago. Many people did, some may still do. It was an amazing place. People were super friendly, the women were curious about foreigners... Today Brazil is much less welcoming for foreigners, even slightly xenophobic. They still have an economic crisis and I wonder what will happen if the world economy cools down. It also has become dangerous again. People change, countries change, I may have changed.
So this brings us to Colombia. It is very cheap to fly there from the states. I had many adventures there, got certified in scuba diving, slept on a tiny house on an island when scuba diving, learned horse riding in Saint Augustin, got lost in the mountains when hiking near Armenia (visit Salento!). Partied super hard at night in Medellin, Cali and Bogota. People were super friendly, approaching me and other travelers and telling us how happy they are the things have changed in Colombia and foreigners are now visiting. The climate is super interesting since you are near the equator but also have the Andean mountains. You basically can get every temperature you want. From hot Caribbean (and overrated) Cartagena, to the city of eternal spring, Medellin, to cold Bogota. I love the Candelaria district in Bogota (as I once loved Santa Teresa in Rio). It is a magic place and brings me happiness.
People change, countries change, and I may change again. What worries me about Colombia is that more and more foreigners are coming (voted as number ?. tourist destination last year). This is seldom a good thing. Sooner or later the place will change and people will get fed up with tourists. SO if you want to visit, better visit now and not in 10 years.
Literature, there is not only 100 years of solitude, try to appreciate Nicolás Gómez Dávila.
What? You reaching man. There are a lot of cultural stereotypes from different African countries, just like how Americans see Germans as 'cold and reserved' and Italians as 'loud and friendly'.