I've worked and traveled in many developing countries, and the key seems to be to get to the point where you have a self-perpetuating middle class: there have to be enough people with disposable income that they can start a virtuous cycle where their spending pulls other people out of poverty. And this is most easily (if that's the word) done by creating factory jobs that both pay better than farming and reward the entrepreneurial. This happened in China, in Singapore, in Korea, in Japan, in Thailand, and thanks to the BPO industry it's starting to happen in the Philippines and India as well. Alas, it's manifestly failing to happen in Africa.

As it happens, I'm typing this in a mid-tier Vietnamese city of some fame as a beach resort. Coming out the War of American Aggression (as they call it here), Vietnam had a hardline Communist government and sub-Saharan Africa levels of poverty, with most people earning a dollar a day or less, but in the 1980s they finally started experimenting with capitalism. When I first visited this city in the early 2000s, there were a few hotels, but they catered almost exclusively to adventurous foreigners.

In 2022, the equation has been flipped completely on its head: the beach is packed side to side with highrises that could easily be in Miami or the Gold Coast, and 99% of the visitors here are now locals. This applies even at the top-end places like the Western chain hotel I'm staying at, which is completely booked out, and the expensive seafood restaurants: the one I ate at tonight was doing a roaring trade in imported Alaskan king crabs selling for hundreds of US dollars each. And for every hi-so there's 10 or 100 regular folks on company-sponsored getaways and the like, and behind every domestic tourist there's the local low-cost airline with its air crew and ground staff, the Grab (Uber) driver, the tour guide, the IT guy sorting out the hotel's networking, etc etc.