 Welcome everyone and welcome to this second dialogue on dialogue on development research which is organized by SCI development and aid policy team and the Swedish Development Researchers Network. My name is Janette Vahemaki and I'm the team leader for the DAP team and director for SWEDF. So shortly it's the DAP team development aid policy team at SCI was formed in September 2022 for the response to an internal project looking at development dimensions of the SCI's work and despite that SCI is conducting a lot of work within the development field and has a dual mandate development and environment it has mainly been recognized as an environment thing thank so far. So the DAP team works with issues related to human development and environment from local to global scale and SWEDF we are a member-based network constituted in November 2019. The network works with strengthening collaboration within the research community and with increasing interaction between development researchers and practitioners. With these dialogues and this series of dialogues we want to spread findings of development research. It should be a learning space where development researchers around the world can share and discuss their work with other researchers and practitioners and policy makers. So to this dialogue today we're happy to introduce our speaker Stef under con. You know I've been extremely lucky in last 30 years in terms of the career I've been able to have up to now. I've been an academic for 30 years and I'm very much a microeconomist studying really at the micro level what happens to households, rural households, sometimes urban workers and in different parts of the world although mainly in Africa although some work in South Asia and a bit in Latin America as well. What I think allowed me to do a little bit more is that beyond you know writing the papers and talking to a lot of people on the ground I've always been able to at least have a link with policy and but often for an academic that means go and talk a lot but since 2011 I've been closely involved with first with DFIT and now with the FCDO so basically with the UK development operation you know as an academic as an outsider I'm not at the time when I was becoming chief economist of DFIT I wasn't even British I'm Belgian of birth and I have been able to actually also working at a very senior level meeting with very senior people and some will recognize some of the people I have in the middle panel of the picture and to actually engage with them and making me think a bit about development about the big picture of it okay so while I'm a researcher and I work on the as a researchers tend to do answering small questions very well a lot of the work I've been doing and the one that's reflected in the book and also I want to talk about it is actually about the big picture and you know and I think the big picture matters because the big picture is fascinating is interesting is positive and worrying at the same time this is a picture that many of you will recognize this comes from the data from our world in data an excellent source or any data that you ever want to use in and publicly available and this basically tells us between 1990 and 2018 you know the number of extreme poor people in the world now we could have a whole similar and in fact the whole workshop and weeks of work on definitions of poverty I use here the kind of the extreme poverty idea as in the World Bank is being trying to do because it allows us to at least compare between countries and between over time allowing for costs of living differences and purchasing power parity differences if we in 1990 we have probably about two billion people poor just under that are using that definition and most of them are in this red block which is actually East Asia which largely is in this particular case actually China about 800 million extreme poor people in China the orange bit is South Asia and that's of course mainly India in terms of population and we were at that time you know easily 50 60 percent of the Indian population would be an extreme poverty the blue one is Africa it's relatively small relative to the other areas because actually sub-Saharan Africa is rather small in population and definitely at the time it was now what we get is the evolution and the evolution shows that heterogeneity massive progress in the red block which is basically the massive poverty reduction in China starting in the 90s mainly in the 1990s that actually started a little bit before as well then we get in the orange bit in South Asia especially in India somewhere from the mid northeast that the data started to show a systematic decline in this extreme poverty now doesn't mean that people are not deprived anymore that they are rich people now of course but it's that first step that is very striking and sub-Saharan Africa the blue well there the stories is of anything it's been increasing very slowly it's as a share of the population it's gone down but we are probably by 2018 the last year of the data that are publicly available would be about 450 million people of course we know with COVAX on this total number of about 550 million people globally in the world in extreme poverty we worry that about 150 million people have been added which would mean if you look at this picture we've we've gone back about maybe six or seven years okay so it's not that it's totally back to to disastrous situation but of course we have the backlash still what is so important it's not just the story between Africa staying behind and Asia going ahead and South Asia being slower than than China actually I find really the most interesting thing over the years that I've been working also and across across the world in so many different places is that actually we start getting heterogeneity even in sub-Saharan Africa and I think that's a really important bit we had you know Africa has a lot of countries but some of them are quite small but of the 18 countries that have more than 8 million population by 1919 and more than 20 percent extreme poverty there's only two that have been able to halve their extreme poverty in that period which is which is Ghana and Ethiopia but then a number of others about seven have actually doubled the number in extreme poverty now that's differentiation some really doing quite well in this period others really quite poorly and you see these names and especially the DRC in Nigeria Madagascar will always come out in the data probably Malawi Zambia as well as the as the next ones in terms of the large increases now that is also reflected simply in the economic sense and whatever discussion we would have when we look at GDP basic GDP figures reflect the same patterns you know there's no country that in a sustainably way sustainable way sustainable in the sense that in a durable in a sustained way reduced extreme poverty without actually getting their economies to grow because this economy started in 1990 really relatively small you know that most of them were beyond 2000 dollars in 2011 prices in purchasing power parity that actually would mean most of them were low income countries with most usual definitions in this picture but then you see some actually have flat evolution and we could talk more about them but Nigeria the DRC that very little has been happening Nigeria there's only this jump largely because of new data a kind of a new way of calculating GDP at some point it would have been otherwise flat otherwise you get certain countries and of course China the strongest mover but then he also get Indonesia that had to sustain movement after a blip in 97 at the Asian crisis but then you get India Vietnam but also Bangladesh and Ethiopia actually being quite considerably better of than they were around 1990 and these are the kind of countries I want to talk about and actually my question is really why is it that these countries in these recent periods evolve in a quite a different way relative to some of the more stagnant places like the DRC or Malawi or Nigeria and indeed where poverty has been increasing quite a lot what what do these places have in common and so that's actually of course an old question in development economics that usually gets addressed by you know methods that I definitely will not touch anymore cross-country growth regressions there's so many flaws in it we can't quite do it and in the book I don't try to do it like that I'm actually trying to do it in form of case studies I'm looking for common elements in a large number of countries that that that we're dealing with um of course it's not I'm not the first one that that tries to have big picture questions about all these people and I'm it's a bit like a pop quiz type of thing you know how many do you recognize of these big names but I can show you they've all written best-selling books in economic development in the last 15 years um but I'm giving away now the titles these are the kind of typical books that people end up reading now I'm not saying these are the best ones or these are the ones that you should be reading although I think they're worthwhile reading they have a very diverse set of views and they they they talk about the big picture idea you know how does poverty gets reduced how do countries grow and and do get better off and with very different views on aid and so on when you start reading them and I reread them again writing this book you know you you you you I'm very struck how much they always focus on what needs to be done the kind of policies that needs to be done and in fact most of our profession seems to be obsessed with trying to say these are the things we need to be doing as development economists or other development experts what to do and what not to do and of course it's important because you would like countries to do the right thing but when you read and dig a bit deeper in these books you have actually two big competing diagnosis that actually probably you know still stand after 20 years and the people are still fighting between the two between these two big groups one is probably best encapsulated in you know the why nations fail view of Asimoglu and Robinson where it basically says you know well you can only do development if you get the institutions right okay now I think there's something interesting worthwhile in it but for me the question is really where does it lead us you know and when you read why nations fail it's actually can be quite a depressing book because the best policy advice it seems to be giving is actually well sorry you got the wrong history why didn't you try to get yourself a better history because the institutions tend to be determined through history they can't be shaped like that and now you kind of get into the sense like you know well I'm sorry you had a bad history about colonial history another type of other bits of history well that's it and development and in their view you get a sense that development only can start once you get that sorted you know and it's it's a pretty depressing view actually to actually say well you know buy yourself another history or I'm going to make you another history no these are things that slowly change about them but there is more to it when we look at the success stories of recent times that have grown fast and that have grown fast and reduced poverty considerably and then we're thinking about you know the China's but also the Indonesia's the Bangladesh's the Ghana's the Ethiopia's on the list that I have they're very flawed countries their institutions were definitely not looking like what I said before that Douglas North would have said you needed to have so actually a lot of development takes place in imperfect institutions let me quickly say this importantly for China you know China the biggest success story China in 1979 when we date this progress was an absolute disaster in fact many of us and I was very young then but I do remember the discussions about whether China would survive or not because it had come out of the cultural evolution it had done in the 1970s that Mao died and then the gang of four for those who remember that history Mao Mao's widow there was a huge power struggle going in the party and there was just normal clarity and normal clarity in terms of what the party was doing it was actually all ideology and no pragmatism no policy nothing was happening and by 1979 you know when the reformers under Deng Xiaoping got the upper hands in the party congress you know there was no one who thought that oh surely now China will grow for the next 40 years that was definitely not that sense this was an absolute gamble for them you know making statements suddenly like oh well we know that the central party and the ideology has kept this country kept us empowering this country now we're going to have sayings like it doesn't matter whether the cat is white or black as long as it catches mice or basically saying it doesn't matter whether we use capitalism or communism it doesn't matter as long as we grow the economy and you do that in a moment when there's none of the normal conditions for a market economy to emerge that is actually a real gamble and it's really very very much against this kind of big hypothesis now and another part of it of course with this institutional view is to simply say well you know it is all history and that's what success will be and in fact you know if if James Robinson would be sitting here would say yeah but China won't succeed okay maybe not but it's been doing quite well for a long time maybe 50 years we'll see we will see and maybe it's too too too early to tell but there is an issue there so why 1979 if it's if it's or indeed why did some of the other success stories across history wait for that particular moment in time to to go if it's all about getting the institutions they seem to be evolving but why does the industrial revolution start when it started or why in 1979 in one place is in Ghana I would say in the 1990s when something dramatically began to change and in Ethiopia probably 2005 after a first move in 1991 why then and not before and actually why do success stories what they wait for now of course you could say okay that's the moment they got their policies right now of course that's true they started doing things that were right and I can't argue with that that actually started doing certain things I want to say two things about it when most of the academics who used to say that they had a very narrow set of policies what they called right and actually if we look at what all these countries they did it a vast plethora of policies very different things state led market led a strong state a democracy very different ways that they actually went about doing it but at the same time there's a lot of countries that also don't do it and if it's all just getting the policies right we seem to often behaving as if well we need to explain to say the Malawi and government what the right policies would be look Malawi I'm sure it gets actually pretty bad deal in my book Malawi has been doing this for 60 years you know and it actually very little change has happened definitely in last 20 30 years or 30 years after democracy came it's still very little has changed and so the question you have to ask why don't they and I don't want to believe the history the kind of explanation that we sometimes hear all we need to explain to them we need to show them the evidence no no there's a lot of things sensible things that most governments could be doing and many of them choose not to do it and that's what you want to understand okay that leads me down to basically the simple story of where I see this difference and I'll have to hurry up a little bit on the left hand side you see the prime minister's office in in in kinshasa in the DRC on the right hand side you see a drawing of the Ethiopian prime minister's office ask for instance has happened about seven years ago I was within a few months at a very similar meeting in both and in both cases I was there with the leading experts and they were going to tell me what they were going to do to their development plan which they were going to do and in kinshasa I was offered by a whole group it was a very large group of people all the kind of chief advisors to the prime minister's all advice to the prime minister and they gave this beautiful plan I mean I had to say wow this is really thought through how are we going to get agriculture going infrastructure going investment climate macroeconomic stability education health you name it they had something for it and it's just really pretty good they had a clear sense of the evidence they have a clear sense of what to do it and I remember walking out of the room telling my my colleague that I was with and saying wow this was quite amazing wasn't this an amazing piece of theater because nothing will happen of this and of course nothing ever happened with any of these plans meanwhile we were in Ethiopia not long after and we were presented with I would say very flawed plans there were really tricky things that were going to do and we were actually they had to invite and serve a lot of people for Carlisle, Justin Lin, Land Pritchard some of you will recognize these names and they were they were all there where we're debating with these people you know in high level people central bank governor, minister of finance and so on all very tech quite technocratic people and you know we're really worried about whether it's going to work and said look this will probably derail this as a diagnosis why this market isn't working well it's probably not a good idea and indeed they were doing all kinds of things that I would say hmm not sure but I remember all of us walking out and saying wow they're going to do this and they're probably going to succeed because they will actually if it doesn't work correct themselves try something else and they'll keep on going and of course in the period between 2010 and 2019 this was Ethiopia was the fastest growing economy in the world and they did it they didn't they didn't do it with perfection but they did it with you know clearly trying to to learn and do things and that leads me to the kind of ideas I have in the book the kind of the core part of the book which is basically say look I borrow quite a bit from Douglas North and I put it here and you can surely quickly read it it's kind of a dense piece but basically says you know you should think of a state always have some coalition amongst people with power and influence some elite groups that somehow form a coalition that make the rules of who has access to resources who controls the land capital labor and who has access to and controls valuable activities who gets the license to trade who can get the education and so on and sometimes can be more open sometimes more closed but actually a state you could probably always see this as a way of overcoming as a coalition to actually say look when we are in control that we can keep stability and then these rules of the game that will help us then how we run the place now of course it could be quite darkly very small group of people it could be quite open now I want to emphasize that even in very developed countries a very rich countries like the US or in sweden we have all kinds of controls on who gets access to valuable resources we all have inheritance laws so it means if someone was rich in the 13th century the chances of their their offspring today are that they are still rich is pretty high now that's a rule that we set that say okay that's clearly someone in the 13th century and beyond has found it in their interest to keep these rules and so we do have this this is not just in that's functioning societies and we are perfect we have all kinds of rules of the game in that sense as well now that leads me down to the way I want to look at in the book at it just basically look at every state that you observe as somehow an elite bargain a deal between the elites amongst those with power and influence you know and that could be not just the political leaders and that's why I talk about an elite bargain this is rarely just about political leaders there's also leaders in business senior civil servants sometimes the military sometimes top people in civil society in universities and so on and they kind of every state you meet there is the you can think of it it's in the in the minimal around already a kind of a coalition of stability you know where you set certain rules of the game who has most to say at one moment who can do certain things not do things but it's a it's a way of keeping the place stable and peaceful but it always involves some kind of political deal who controls the decision making in the state but also an economic deal who for example has access to the resources of the state who has access to the jobs in the state who has access to the resources in the economy the rules that are set for how an economy would function are we allowing monopolies are we not allowing them are we granting licenses to import and whatever so it's basically always a bit of a political deal an economic deal and that's quite quite central and quite key in the way I want to think about it and every society has this and I want to emphasize you know no society is perfect you know I come from Belgium you know if you're don't have a party card you can't be a top civil servant top civil servants are allocated based on political connections that's not just meritocracy that's political connections it wasn't the case in in the in the UK but if you go to the US and you have a lot of money you have a really big influence in politics because party financing and political financing is very liberal there and so on we have all these games of course you also get in developing countries where you get kleptocracies where a state seems to be organized largely as an instrument to steal from them from from everybody in society including from business and then try to divide it amongst a very small group of people you could have clientelist states where most of the jobs in the state are created as a reward for those people who supported you to get elected or indeed you make sure that your ethnic group or another group gets the return and so on and so on you can have all kinds of states now what does that have to do with development actually something very simple you know I might contention my my fundamental point of the book is that you know we can keep on talking about the policies and the whole kind of things but fundamentally you'll get development or at least you need as an essential precondition for development that those in the elite and the underlying bargain of the elite of power and influence and political economic deal in that society involves also a shared commitment towards growth and development now don't take it for granted that it exists if I have a lot of natural resources I may not have to choose for that because I can make my small group of people that are in power really rich without doing any growth or any development I can explain the DRC very simply like that there is no shared commitment of those with power in anything to do with growth and development because you need don't need it and basically you you you need these things now it needs to be more than words by the leader it needs to be something to do with credible politics because otherwise the stability won't be there it needs to be really shared amongst the political class and also amongst the other parts of the elite in the way they allow the politics to play out but as a state you know what it requires it needs to be self-aware you know it needs to be and the point really is if you have strong state capability at the moment you have that commitment in your elite well maybe you can use the state to do it this is 1979 you at least have something to fall back on in China of 2000 years of centralized taxation 2000 years of a meritocracy in a bureaucracy and 2000 years of centralized power communist party deciding to do development and growth leaning quite a lot on the state although it had to then decentralize power and so on in its governance reforms in 1979 and beyond you can do it by the state when Bangladesh in the early 1980s came out of a really difficult period first the independence battle and the loss of the pre-existing elite a new elite emerging but then a country hit by famine and a lot of political instability in the 1970s that state was actually very weak and actually it's been well documented that quite a lot in growth and development was achieved because the state didn't try to control it it was quite a lot of less affair in the private sector think of the garment industry that managed to emerge there was actually quite a lot of let's say fair in the social sectors where NGOs were allowed to deliver social a lot of the of the things in the social sector with BRAC becoming the largest NGO in the world delivering a lot of the essential service for the poorest in the society there is no country in the world that I think would ever allow an NGO to become as powerful and as big as BRAC and Grameen as Bangladesh did that's a self aware state allowing you to do it of course you need to be able to correct you have to learn it's not straightforward you can get it wrong you need to have a process of accountability so it can't just be ideology of development it has to be action if you go back to the 1970s I have a lot of time for Julius Neuriery but there was nothing of this last thing it was all ideology we're going to do it and we couldn't quite pull it off so keep in mind and I've said already it doesn't have to be perfect institution doesn't have to be markets or the state as a lot of these countries did it in different ways it also doesn't necessarily have to be a democracy and that's actually quite important a lot of people get a bit annoyed with me but the evidence suggests that performance is not especially at the takeover the lower levels of GDP it's not really correlated with political freedom or not and you see that of course empirically you know you have China being quite successful but you have Ghana as well quite successful that Ghana is democracy but also think of Malawi as a democracy and not doing anything Nigeria is a democracy not achieving anything and it actually has a lot to do with yeah I could say the imperfections in it I don't really think so it's in itself it is a lot to do with the nature of the elite commitment I love democracy and I wish there was more but it's not the essential feature of it and now finally it is a gamble a political elite that gambles on it actually and then we have it very clearly in say in 2005 in Ethiopia where the elite that is in control actually has a very fragile political deal between the different groups in its coalition but actually it thinks that it gambles on development on growth as a means of gaining legitimacy from the population actually not very dissimilar how the Chinese Communist Party gambled on it as a way of keeping population on site in the 1990s in China sorry in the 1980s in China and in the after 2005 in Ethiopia but can backfire in Ethiopia the political deal the coalition of power actually then collapsed more recently even though the gamble was done anyway for me that's an obvious story and I've implied it already an elite that once said in Ethiopia there was a clear sense that they wanted it even with all their imperfections they were trying to do it in the DRC they were not doing it this is a bit of in the book different countries I I'm not going to stay too much in it but you get a glance at it you recognize your favorite countries there where there's development bargain somewhere I'm getting optimistic about and others where I think there's none present how do we know it well it has to be about actions it can't be about predictors in history it has to be about intent not more than intent but also with actions and behaviors okay so the way I would say it how would I know my country is moving towards one well actually those with power are beginning to tackle real vested interests very difficult reforms they start doing it in Malawi for example the moment they start they're going to start really tackling the agricultural power statels I think there's a chance we get some progress before that I can't see anything let me then come to the final five minutes which is basically what can outsiders do and it's basically what do we do that in development okay I have this little proviso because in a world of geopolitics we're getting a bit worried that international donor agencies may be getting less interested in development and all getting more interested in in in other things so I put this there but let's assume we still want development in all the countries that we're dealing with well some people would say well what's the worry we have the shared commitment now globally for growth and development we had the millennium declaration of which is the photograph followed by the mdg soon after and then the sdgs in 2015 isn't it wonderful we have the shared global commitment to growth and development our job is done they've all signed well I'm not entirely convinced about okay so for me the sdgs and the mdgs before there's some kind of blueprint where we suddenly behave as the whole world is committed to turn the world into sweden and actually not sweden as you know it but probably sweden as I know it as a belgian where we started thinking oh well that's when I was growing up the perfect society the swedish model all getting the equalities right the growth right the democracy right the tolerance right all the kind of things I worry a bit about there's no country that has developed by first turning itself into sweden as I describe it just now which doesn't even exist actually sweden never developed in that way as well I'm going to surely get pushed back from all of you but what I'm actually more worried about is not just that the blueprint is so unrealistic and and has no sense of history of how development comes about I just look at the picture I see Vladimir Putin there I see a lot of unsavory characters that actually were involved with where actually indicted by international court of justice for crimes against humanity several of them that we know or indeed have been sanctioned for ground corruption and a lot of other unsavory regimes the problem with the sdgs is that for those countries that really have already a development bargain a lead bargain for growth and development they don't need new york to actually say it it's nice to have it's a nice way than to to actually saying we all we all agree on that but for those who have no commitment to development of which there are lots of heads of states on this picture well there's no credibility to it there's nothing dead it doesn't bind them this is not this is a commitment that is not credible and that's the important part of a development bargain it has to be credible and it has to be reflecting in actions but it also has important implications finally for eight well you know if you're a country with a development bargain actually eight is easy I'm definitely not here than go and bash eight in fact in for example Ghana and Bangladesh eight was actually really essential part of the progress that they've made eight is a little bit like dancing the tango you know it should be led by someone and I think it should be led by the country uh ownership matters here the country should lead and then you dance the tango and if you then both really committed to dancing the tango well then actually eight is quite easy we can do quite a lot of good stuff we can do working with these governments really helping them to make progress and actually do anything I think that's what we did in Ghana and in Bangladesh quite effectively and to some extent in Ethiopia during this key period as well despite all the troubles that we can do but try to imagine dancing the pole dancing sorry dancing the tango with a country that's leading and that actually wants to dance the polka so if it's dancing the polka and you try to dance in the tango of course it's going to be an absolute mess and that's basically you start to ask yourself if the country doesn't want to develop what am I doing with it I'm definitely not doing development at best I may try to do some good but we use all kinds of language that actually is really illusory and actually is dishonest and we should be more humble and it's basically we may be doing good but I have one extra point to make on that I also worry in a lot of countries where we do this we risk how we we respond to a minister of health because they said look I really want to do health but meanwhile the elite bargain doesn't care at all I'm thinking of Nigeria for most of the last decades which was the country that spent least on health as a share of its government budget of anywhere in the world now do we need to give them aid to that country even though it's spending on all kinds of quite far less important things well we give them definitely the excuse we give them an excuse to actually not do anything we're actually helping that elite bargain to stay a parallel elite bargain and that actually is quite important we're not doing development we actually risk to do harm and that's sort of of course the last that we want to do and all conditionality and results based aids we could have a long conversation that I don't think it matters that much so what can we do let me very quickly say in the last minute everywhere we can definitely do internationally things that really should encourage countries that are moving to a development bargain already have one and that actually is quite almost maybe a punishment for countries or a way of avoiding very bad development very bad elite bargains that are non-developmental so for example it's very hard for a country to export it needs a really concerted effort of governments you know giving trade preferences and really much more favorable as we do at the moment even import substitutes from some countries I would be great I'm not very much in favor of it at the same time you know we worry about often about illicit finance tax havens and so on we usually argue about the wrong point it's not about tax I never wanted to give a lot of money back to Kabila Kabila would have wasted it it would have been a waste of money to get all that illicit finance back to Kabila and I'm tempted to say with Burrari the same actually the main problem with illicit finances it keeps these regimes in operation that's how politics is financed in these places by contracts from the mining companies favoring certain families certain things and then managing to get the money back to these leaders that then have a lot of money to spend in the countries the minimal I would say you can't just do development in a neutral way you are a political actor you are shifting the incentives of the politics in these places when we do it so maybe you should do and the book has a lot in the last part a lot on that how you could probably do this whether you do reform but you should really be aware that that you are risking embedding the status quo so I'll stop now and I want to emphasize here you know what we don't want is to pedal technocratic solutions and thinking we can have easy solutions but if we are working countries with a development bar game or where we think it's emerging and we can talk more about it how we could recognize them I think we should really support them very strongly but at the same time we should be wherever else that we should have no illusions what we do I have nothing against doing humanitarian it and actually or even trying to do good but we should always ask am I risking making it worse for me a really crucial moment was when I really started changing my mind was in South Sudan talking to a rebel commander when the civil war was raging and we had flown with the UN helicopter into rebel health territory to look at how the the support by the NGOs was was going and by the UN was going and talking to that rebel commander I asked him what he thought of these NGOs because some of them have been there for 30 years giving emergency aids and he simply said you know what I really like them here because it allows me to focus on the important business of war and so basically we were essentially helping to prolong the conflict there and that was a really crucial thing anyway we should really think carefully therefore of how these countries function their politics and when we think about how to support them think so carefully about the points of the entry points for change and how but also how we may embed bad elite markets thank you thank you very much for their call I hope you can hear me now yes all right so we have a few questions but I'm probably kick it off with my own question I have a very very fundamental question here I mean what do the findings of this book actually mean for for development research in other ways is there a scope to do more research on these issues and what questions should we be asking and how should we approach these questions shall I quickly take this yeah so no that's an excellent question so there's two things here I think first of all as researchers first of all as researchers we should learn to be a bit more modest and when we are talking about you know if you do this this will happen or these are the policy implications to actually you know sometimes saying look this is really not where you either could start or you know once you wear if you were to act on this what would be the further effects in the local political economy and what would happen and I think we should learn to be a bit more humble in the way we do do to some of our work the second thing is so it's you know we all these statements about what works and so on you know many of these things will work in countries where where where the part is to work with I think governments or in power really want it to work and then you can actually get things done so so we should just be a bit more careful on this so it's my primary concern is that I would like us to have more impacting interventions and that also means any advice that we give and then that relates to a second point is that you know the our advice our technical advice that and also the questions we research you know the why we get certain outcomes in certain contexts have a lot to do with the with the political economy so you should be willing to see how can I actually integrate some more political economy analysis in the way I do work I can refer to a paper by Daron Asimoklu and Jim Robinson in Journal of Economic Perspectives in 2013 who actually really in an interesting way try to actually explain this but and then and then we should actually be studying you know much more combining our economic understanding we shouldn't leave it to political scientists because they don't understand economics very well we should also it's not just about the politics it's often to do with you know how how how particular economic interventions how particular advice we give how that actually may work through the political economy but we need to know the economics at the same time we should be willing to learn more of the economic sorry more of the political science yes they had a brilliant conversation with someone based in Malagua in Nicaragua and he was actually saying well we rarely study also the the preferences of the elite we take for granted that governments actually have preferences that are the same as ours we want development we want growth and we actually don't do that either so there would be certain bits that we could study as well but my main thing is I think for research is to actually find ways of integrating how political equilibria and economic economic interventions interact thank you very much we have a number of audience questions here so I'll post one of them and there's a specific case that he had been mentioned Ghana and it has been touted as a beacon of democracy in Africa and so on and so forth yet the dividends of of development is concentrated among a few of the elites widening inequalities between the rich and the poor and also perception of corruption is quite high and accountability is suboptimal and the question is could Ghana have grown exponentially as China with other strategies and this is coming from Prince Obin very good this is an excellent question so you know for me success in this in the conversation we're having there is something relative about it you know expecting China style growth rates is being very unhelpful for most of the world okay and even East Asian growth rates it was an exceptional period in the global economy as well but I could take advantage of could Ghana has Ghana grown in the most optimal way oh no absolutely not and that's actually very striking um similar in Bangladesh we could easily say you know it's grown five to six percent for the last 15 years it could have probably done easily a percent or two more no easily I use that word no no realistically this is actually already quite an achievement so lots of things could have been better but but it's actually at the core of my book as well is that is that phenomenal like corruption um and imperfect democracies they are their part and parcel of historical progress virtually everywhere in the world but actually what I'm quite impressed by and I tell you why I would actually still suggest that Ghana is a success story that the in the 90s the the the deal that seems to have emerged you know with a called it an imposed constitution by Jerry Rawlings an imposed constitution that definitely didn't have you know everybody happy with but within constraints within some tricks of constraints in it with on ethnic politics and so on somehow or not the political elites actually decided they could have played decided to play by these rules they could have played in different ways as well and I think one of the successes that actually the elite chose political stability which had been lacking in Ghana and political stability was the first thing it gets delivered by a politics that where when people were defeated were willing to actually not keep on trying to fight it for very long and actually respecting the outcome of the elections and then keeping some sense of political stability now that was an important part because it gave that space to combine with some reasonable some some kind of pragmatic economic policies to do quite well and the quite the the quite the quite well is important okay the looking for perfect institutions we can we could have waited forever but in that sense Ghana has done considerably better than say Nigeria it's now surpassed in GDP per capita and actually Nigerians don't like it to be emphasized but Ghana has done and yes corruption is high and accountability is is less but political scientists are also increasingly documenting how for example politics is increasingly more fought at a local level based on results and outcomes it's less about simple patronage and clientelism and so you get some of these forces that are progressive and you know I'll take Ghana as a success I will still call it because it's in the midst of of incredibly poor outcomes and of course it can get much better and that's Indonesia is interesting it's all the time working progress and gradually it's doing a bit better and a bit better and all these things and I think that's the historical evolution and maybe it can we can go faster you know the development progress in Ghana is there of course it would be nicer and better if it was less inequality and so on but again similar to Indonesia or Bangladesh you know I'm happy to start taking some of that progress and I'm willing to call them quite successful because we have so few of them actually on the continent thank you prof we we still have quite a number of very very important questions from the audience so we're trying to be shorter and don't be sure there's one request that maybe you provide the the title of the paper you refer to by Asimoglian Robinson the general of economic perspectives and the next question is from Matthew Osborne and he says that requiring a political elite to gamble collectively on future growth requires a degree of homogeneity of this group or at least this would be an advantage to develop trust and coordination does this mean that the countries with significant ethnic and or religious heterogeneity may be at a disadvantage has this come out in your analysis and if so how can this be managed or are such countries always at a disadvantage and there's another question that connects it quite well it says that if democracy isn't absolutely necessary which is something that you mentioned and development has been driven by political elites willing to gamble on development what agency do poor people have in this process do they have a role or is it up to external experts to ensure that political elites are doing what they should be doing on behalf of their nations poor now after that we have a series of questions I think we can give some short answers to them thank you yeah so the can you give me one word of the first one again it will go back I was writing something down what was the first that you mentioned it says that does this mean that the countries with significant ethnic yeah so so look so we live in a world of imperfection okay and there's historic history matters you know I'm not going to try to deny history colonial history will matter and colonial history delivered a lot of that of borders of countries with with ethnic diversity religious diversity and so on so there's all kinds of factors you know I come from Belgium where we have lots of language groups where very little homogeneity and yes I would say that that that that that of course it doesn't allow us to do what's for example in China could be done where the vast vast vast majority of Chinese and and the history that I described China had advantages now yes there's disadvantages you know and I'm I'm also never expecting Malawi to start growing like Singapore or or things like that but the interesting thing is it's the way you begin to overcome these things as an elite that's that I find most important and I'm linking on to link the two questions take for example I'm actually getting more optimistic about Kenya that I used to be you know Kenya should actually be a far more dynamic country since independence it uh it was delivered with with with a lot of opportunity it has all kinds of endowments that could benefit from and so on and arguably economically it was very poorly run and then you also had a lot of instability due due to ethnic politics the constitutional reform after the virus of 2007 or is it 2007 or 2008 I forget now the exact date but when the election violence violence was very very severe um you know the constitutional actually something quite clever because one of the basis of why why the ethnic strife came so to a head because the presidential system that they had was so much gave basically so much control to the president and so basically the real battle was all the time who controls the presidency because then you control the state as an instrument for clientelism and patronage actually they they did decentralization so it means that um and I sometimes joke to my friends in Kenya to say you have decentralized corruption but actually it helped you with your stability it actually basically if you don't win the presidency now you actually can go local so it's the way you look for your solutions and basically a governor now still has quite a lot of power and influence and that's a quick keep up do poor people that have any agencies well I I start with with maybe an unfortunate realistic position where I say looking most societies lower groups don't have that much agency they can do agitation they can do for sure and and and within certain systems there's more than others but there is an important path and again China is interesting but in Tunisia as well in very different ways in Tunisia in the 1970s actually Ethiopia as well in after 2005 as well as China in the 1980s these were regimes that were at that time all quite autocratic but they they recognize that power required some form of legitimacy and they actually needed to respond and in Indonesia it came from civil war before and in Ethiopia similarly with lots of tensions and an electoral defeat that they had suffered as a government in 2005 that actually the signals were there from below that they actually didn't have enough legitimacy so one reason why an elite can choose for growth and development is because they need legitimacy so there is something to do with fostering shared commitment from below and the book actually talks about ways that you can actually foster that but I'm unfortunately trying to be quite realistic is that actually yes the agency of the elite is so much more superior to the agency from below to say that therefore needs experts no experts have a minimal role it's actually the elite itself that has to make these choices and all the countries that have become quite successful it's their elites that make the choices the outsiders they have a minor role at best we can support them if they take that choice but there's no expert from outside who will actually make any leader that hasn't chosen a development bargain to make the leap towards the development bargain. Thank you very much we're running out of time but if you can give very very short answer to some of these remaining questions I'll be highly appreciated. This one is we're concerned for the environment complicates the development bargain quite briefly if you can't provide some answers to that and then this one is probably you don't have to answer that but you know Ragnar proposes something for users this is a very important test for your thesis an example is Malawi is getting a development bargain sufficient for a country with so few resources I mean the country has a lot of other constraints on its development possibility so I mean this is I guess an open question but who concern for the environment complicates the development bargain something that you can provide okay so quickly on the environment very quickly on the environment is the you know of course it concern with the environment it complicates but similarly we you know without a development bargain I don't see a country actually paying at all attention to to protecting natural capital or indeed getting concerned about global warming and so on so it's actually more my concern is that in a world where we again give a lot of attention to climate finance and so on there's only going to be a subset of countries that actually will generally use it in a way that actually is provides a useful resource and I'm very concerned that a lot of climate finance that we're promising that we've reduced it to a finance problem but actually we also have to have a real serious commitment problem and I write in the book about the environment chapter three touches touches as well on it and in a few other places and I refer to it a country like Malawi it comes back to this point you know we can't expect too much Malawi will never be Singapore Malawi will never have extremely fast growth there's low resources that's some pretty good agriculture but at the same time you know it is the only country that has had sustained peace amongst the 10 poorest countries in the world it has sustained peace Malawi should have done that and it definitely can do a couple of percent of growth a much better record in and much better record in getting its own service to work for the poor much less the reliance just on eight that is a lot of it is just humanitarian stuff there's very little change happening I do put yeah it's it you know a few percent more of growth in GDP per capita terms I think that's what it can achieve I'm not asking for much more and I'm very confident that it actually could be you know I have a sentence in my book and say Malawi should not be this poor Malawi should not be this poor and I will say this it doesn't mean it should be it can be easy to get to thank you very much I guess we cannot continue with the questions but we'll pass them on to Prof and then we'll leave the answers but thank you so much for coming to talk to us about your book back to you Janet yes thank you so much Stefan for your presentation and talking to us on this very very interesting and I definitely got an appetite to buy your book and read it and learn more about it and I really love that you are things are not so easy it's complicated and we really need researchers to look at things like what is happening in in different countries and different contexts and then talking to policy makers about this so I'm really glad that you are doing it and I know you're presenting your book to several policy makers and so so I really hope that you get success there and just thank you all for participating in this dialogue and you're welcome we will have more of these dialogues next coming in September most probably we'll if you want to know about the coming dialogues please sign up to the Svedev newsletter Ilva put a note on them in the chat on that and we will then invite other guests to speak and hope we can get spread the word about these dialogues as well and continue this work on bridging between research and policy making so thanks again Stefan and thanks everyone for participating and thanks George for moderating