[MinimalAction]

Nice article! The upshot is that the boom of Chinese commodity prices in the mid-2010s is what stopped poor countries from catching up. That's a high level answer, but there's more nuance to it. In many places, I firmly believe the poor governance added with unnecessary bureaucracy is how half the countries lose sight on development. The prime example is India and to some extent Brazil.

[piva00]

Brazil is a prime example of what the lack of revolutions ousting old elites create in colonised countries.

There was no revolution for independence which kept the same families of land owners in the elites through it, after there was no revolution to phase out the monarchy in favour of the Republic, and the same entrenched elites managed to keep going since their local power was already settled. All of this is late 19th century.

Push this through the 20th century, and the same elites wanted to keep their power which was mostly based on agriculture production or mining: coffee, sugar cane, cattle, gold, iron ore, manganese. Any divergence of public policy investment away from these was met with hard pushback.

Industrialisation really only started in Brazil in the 1940s, it was rapid and captured by the same groups, just barely 20 odd years into the process the military dictatorship took over power and maintained the process of corporatism into the same elites (since most of those were supportive of the junta). Another 20 years of dictatorship left a corrupt political body, with the amnesty for the junta many members of the dictatorship party went back into normal political life under democratic rule with predictable outcomes to whom they would favour.

There never was a revolution such as land reform to distribute power in rural areas to more people, no industrial revolution to tear down agriculture/extractivism-based elites grip on power, and with corruption there's always the tilting of the scales towards the old elites with deep connections throughout all the layers of the State in new ventures.

Many issues with Brazil's high corruption stem from these roots, "coronelismo" [0] is still present even in large state capital cities.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coronelism

[dartharva]

"Poor governance" tends to be an easy catchall term to shift blame on for economic failures, but reality is, like you said, a lot more nuanced. India's socialist government looks justifiably horrible and inefficient when looked at through a rational economist's glasses, but what many don't realize is that its main priority for most of its existence has been stabilizing regions and preventing balkanization, which it has achieved significantly, sadly having to fall back to political nationalism (another catchall term the author of this article himself uses to push some blame) and socialist federal overreach to achieve it. We tend to be quick to notice failures but God knows how many circumstances we have dodged that were too close to disruptive civil war without recognizing it.

[constantius]

I probably don't understand your point, but if the result of having the prevention of balkanisation as the overriding goal is a "horrible and inefficient" government, why is it a good goal? If India had fractured into its component states (and you seem to imply that this has often been a strong threat), would the people have been poorer? It's rare that independent states ever want to rejoin their historical country of origin.

Genuine question, not a judgment.

[orwin]

To be fair, I understand why 'preventing balkanization' is a target, but I'm not sure it's a correct one. By de-federalizing a bit, even temporarily, for a few decades, India might have fared a bit better overall. But I understand why they chose not to, it is a very dangerous choice that can end very poorly.