 Ond ydych chi wedi'i gweithio y cwestiynau'r cerdd yn y ddiweddol yn sefyllfa y semanaeth Cerdd 2024, a'n ddweud i'n gwybod yn fwy o'r cyfle, ond byddwn i'w fawr o'n gyffredinol, ac yn fawr i'r cerdd honno i'r llyfr o bwysig i'r newid ymddangos, ond yw'r llyfr o'r cerdd yn ymddangos, ac mae wedi'u gweithio i'n gweithio'r cyfle o gwybod yn yr ystyried wrth gwrs. for some months now, for some years, I would say even. No, we've been talking about it certainly in the effect of states crowd. We've been looking forward to this book very much. And so Tom's going to talk to us. It's called Ethiopia's Developmental State Political Order and Distributive Crisis. I'm going to tell you a little bit about Tom and then we're going to, Tom's going to talk for about what did we say about 45? Yeah, and then Q&A afterwards, so picture questions lined up. Oh, I should say I'm Naomi Hussain. I work in the Development Studies Department. I think some of you who've been in our seminars before have probably seen me before. So, Tom Lavers is a reader in politics and development at the University of Manchester's Global Development Institute. He's been researching the politics and political economy of land, industrial policy, infrastructure and social protection in Ethiopia since 2005. His publications include two OUP edited volumes on the Politics of Social Protection in 2020 and 2022. And they're very good because I have a chapter in one of them, so I know that. And he's got a forthcoming book, another new book coming out to be published by Oxford University Press entitled Dams, Power and the Politics of Ethiopia's Renaissance. And that's coming out when? How much time, Peckley? Oh, I'll make it fast. You've been a bit busy. Yeah. And we'll have to get you to come back to talk about Dams, then, as well as articles in development and change, journal of agrarian change and world development amongst others. So, Tom, are we all set technically? Is that okay? Yeah. Yeah. So, Tom, up here if you. Wonderful. Thanks everyone for coming and for resisting the temptation to go and see canal sen instead. Yeah, so this book basically is concerned with the circumstances under which late developing countries might achieve the challenge of structural transformation of their economies and particularly whether the path of development in which in which took place in much of East Asia and which authoritarian regimes became in many cases pursued development as a means of maintaining power is still viable in contemporary what I call late, late developing countries in this book. I just want to say one thing. We are actually recording this session. So, if anyone doesn't want to be on record, don't say anything you don't want to know about. Sorry, just have to say that. Very good. Yeah. And in many senses Ethiopia is quite a good case study for looking at this. Basically, the government that came into power in 1991, run by the Ethiopian peoples, a revolutionary democratic front. Laterally, after a period of sort of post conflict reconstruction, war with Eritrea in the late 1990s, oversaw this period of very rapid progress from the early 2000s. So, I picked out some fairly random selection of socioeconomic indicators here. On the top left hand corner, you've got economic growth where basically averaging somewhere in the region of 10% a year from the early 2000s. And with the result, the economy trebled roughly over that period. The top right, you've got a couple of different infrastructure indicators, both roads and installed capacity of electricity generation, which both of which are on a very sharp, almost exponential upward turn, down on the bottom left, poverty headcount, extreme poverty, and then infant mortality. But basically, I mean, you can pick pretty much any socioeconomic indicator and you would get a similar picture. They're all showing a very sharp improvement over this period of time, which led the EPRDF government that was in power at the time to essentially label itself as a developmental state. So, it's not a term I particularly using the book, it's always put in these scare quotes, where it is the label that the government embraced itself and tried to frame itself as a developmental state. With the results of this rapid progress that Ethiopia came to be at a certain point in time kind of considered a model for the rest of Africa for other late developing countries. And indeed Ethiopia, the Ethiopian government tried to portray itself as a model for other countries that they could follow. Now, for those of you that are familiar with Ethiopia at all, you will know that that's only part of the story in that basically over the last decade, beginning around 2014, this progress began to unravel. Starting with a series of protests in Oremir region in central Ethiopia, which gradually spread across other parts of the country, ultimately forcing a change of power within the ruling coalition. So, in 2018, new prime minister from a different faction of the ruling party came to power, and that sort of factional divisions and mass protests ultimately led to unraveling, turning into civil war, which has gone from Tigray region to Oremir and most recently in Anharah region of the country and has threatened to undo much of this socioeconomic progress that was achieved in that period of time. So, the book is trying to reconcile these two somewhat divergent images of Ethiopia and trying to understand quite what was going on. First of all, why a ruling party which has delivered such rapid progress was then pushed out by mass protests against the government and ultimately how this then collapsed into widespread civil unrest. And this is a topic that sort of hasn't really been addressed in a very systematic way until now. Most of the contributions that have sort of commented on this in popular media and some academic discussion have tended to very much place ethnicity front and centre that this is the result of ethnic divisions, ethnic favoritism within the ruling party and so on, and this is the root of a civil war which has indeed manifest along ethnic lines. Now, there's undoubtedly elements of truth in that. There is, you know, ethnicity has been a central feature in the conflict and has become a central dividing line within Ethiopian politics but at the same time the argument is basically that this is presents a somewhat limited picture of what's actually happened and that ultimately I would argue distributive politics are key to understanding both the origins of Ethiopia's rapid development and also the way in which it's unraveled laterally. Particularly both on class and generational lines, these sort of an emerging distributive crisis has contributed to this and it's been that has in turn been filtered through ethnic division, ethnic institutions which has led to the politicisation of ethnicity in this way. So, I won't talk in great detail about theory but I'm happy to come back to it later on. Very broadly speaking, the book builds on the literature on state-led development which has in terms of literature on trying to explain the politics of state-led development has two broad themes within it I would say. One of which associated with the likes of Attle Coley, Peter Evans and so on points to the structure of states and trying to understand what features of states enable governments to intervene and pursue state-led development. So they particularly point to issues of state autonomy and state capacity which enable the state to intervene particularly with the private sector to shape the activities of the private sector and press them towards development. And to some degree they also then consider the origins of that state capacity and autonomy in deeper histories of state formation. Now, I'm not going to focus an awful lot on that side of it. In a long book you have to be somewhat selective about what you present in these talks but suffice to say that Ethiopia is something of an anomaly in a literature which generally dismisses the capability of the African states to pursue development. Ethiopia has long been considered a bit of an exception in comparative analyses of African states. Ethiopia is usually either explicitly included or there's a footnote noting that Ethiopia is a bit of an oddity but basically it has a long history unlike many other places of having a centralized hierarchical state authority. One of the few places that underwent a social revolution in Africa and which further enhanced the capacity and reach of the state and is in some ways quite well placed comparatively in terms of the influence and authority of the state. What I will focus on much more is the second part of it which is essentially trying to understand well why if you have a state which has certain capacities why do political elites actually use that capacity to promote development rather than just using it to maintain themselves in power or to enrich themselves and here build on the work by Richard Donner and his colleagues around the bank who basically argue that it's all down to the elite threat perceptions essentially when elites face mass distributive pressures so the need to cater to deliver for the masses for their populations amid severe resource constraints which mean that it's impossible to just distribute resources from existing revenues and existing state resources and then they have a strong incentive then to pursue development essentially as a means of growing the pie and thereby creating the resources which then can be distributed to their populations and broadly speaking that you know that's going to often begin in an agrarian economy is likely to begin with a focus on agriculture around distributing access to land raising agricultural productivity through improved agricultural inputs and so on which will help to improve people's livelihoods but ultimately is going to require transition to manufacturing as a means of providing mass employment for the population and delivering rising wages through economic upgrading and very broadly speaking so in their work probably Taiwan is the clearest example of this where they basically argue that the fear of communism tied with the very real threat of China influence the elite threat perceptions and pursued both initially agricultural growth and laterally manufacturing as a means of maintaining the elite maintaining themselves in power. Now the jumping off point for this book is to build on that but basically also to recognise that that literature tends to be quite methodologically nationalist it focuses exclusively on the domestic political drivers of what's been going on doesn't really put it in a broader global context and it's essentially a recognition that the context within which late late developing countries in the contemporary era are trying to undergo structural transformation and to develop their economies is very different from early industrialisers or indeed the likes of Korea or Malaysia who've already gone through some of these processes and there's a many different ways why that context differs but to mention a couple of the more prominent ones one is around the global economy and that it's been the global economy has been restructured in in recent decades into global value chains which are dominated by lead firms in already industrialised economies with the result that if you're currently attempting structural transformation and trying to promote domestic firms it's very difficult for those domestic firms to enter into global value chains or and through and achieve the connections or also to develop the capabilities to be able to deliver in in those global value chains and much less to be able to then move up the value chain into the into progressively higher and higher value higher productivity activities which will deliver rising wages and rising living standards at the same time as that you also have delayed demographic transitions but particularly people like Tim Bison have talked about how yeah in the contemporary era or in recent decades countries have managed through technology transfer have managed to reduce fertility rates very rapid reduced mortality rates very rapidly much faster than they've been able to reduce mortality rates resulting in a in a much greater demographic increase much more rapid population growth than was the case in countries which underwent the demographic transition earlier so essentially what you've got is that you know at the same time as you've got very very rapid population growth and enhancing these mass distributive pressures which places a lot of pressure on access to land on and also subsequently on on access to employment the ability of governments to deliver on this is much more constrained than it was in the past in terms of industrial policy and the integration with the global economy so essentially it raises this question that you know even if you end up sorting out that left hand side of the side of the story there and you have these political pressures both state capacity and the incentives for ruling elites to pursue development as a main means of maintaining themselves in power it becomes increasingly uncertain whether whether they will actually be able to deliver the economic growth and the manufacturing growth um that you know was evident in East Asia and elsewhere so to move on to Ethiopia um so a little bit of a history of the EPRDS the EPRDS came to power basically through a civil war fought through the 1970s and 80s it has its origins in the Tigray and people's liberation front um in which fought in fought initially in in the northern region of Tigray we're fighting a Maoist insurrection and from the very beginning it had this kind of dual strategy for trying to gain power on the one hand mass distribution was always a sort of central means of trying to gain the support of the peasantry initially through land reform but also some basic service delivery education and health services and so on at the same time as having this ethno nationalist message trying to mobilise the Tigrayan population against exploitation by the rest of Ethiopia um long story short there was a long civil war that ultimately brought the the TPF to power in 1991 and as that progressed as their ambitions moved beyond Tigray they set up a number of other ethnic based parties to rule other parts of the country and form and to come together to form this EPRDF coalition um now there's a couple points that are relevant there one is essentially that right from the very beginning the EPRDF had this kind of dual structure on the one hand the TPF had fought this civil war over many over several decades and essentially had many of the characteristics that are often associated with revolutionary parties so being highly ideological coherent disciplined and so on and then three much more ad hoc creations which were essentially were largely based on co-opting local local leaders um from the other regions um with the TPF being very much sort of the dominant player within this coalition and when they came to power essentially they had again employed very similar dual strategy for trying to gain for trying to maintain power on the one hand it was based on ethno nationalism so drawing very much on Stalin's approach to the national question they divided Ethiopia up into these ethnic based federal regions um trying to draw around linguistic groups based on the idea that essentially they would by by giving linguistic and cultural rights they would be able to contain a ethnicity um within within those regions and deep politicize it which turns out was a poor calculation but at the same time they also had a very clear distributive strategy um so right from the very beginning this is the prime minister influential prime minister Malasanawi you know drawing on their Maoist roots they had this focus on on gaining and securing the support of the peasantry so his you know made the statement let them never let the peasants never be disaffected once they they are disaffected it'll be the end of the world so you know that was though that orientation was evident right from the very beginning in in the early 1990s but was only enhanced by a series of series of crises which the leadership themselves termed as Armageddon's essentially threats existential threats to both the government and ultimately the country so some urban protests in 2001 and then again in 2005 around the elections that year a major food crisis in 2003 you can also add in a split in the ruling party and also the Eritrean war um in the late 1990s and that those that series of crisis crises served a number of to do a number of things one it concentrated power around Malasanawi so from from 2001 onwards he really was sort of the the you know the single most influential actor with it with it within um the eprdf and dominated the direction that they were going in and it led to this single minded focus on development as the solution to all of their problems that you know this this avalanche of crises that was going on at that time that development would be the means to address them initially focusing on agriculture but ultimately the the imperative of industrializing and creating mass industrial employment and as he said at that time he's convinced that he'll they will cease to exist as a nation unless they grow fast and share their growth with again with this emphasis on very broad-based growth and broad-based distribution now again again have it going to have to skip quite a bit but like essentially through the 1990s there was relatively little progress if you look initially at agriculture um the pressure for agricultural growth laterally that began to change after after the early 2000s after the series of crises and this is you know the the serial yields for the main cereals in Ethiopia all of which show a very sort of sharp upward trend um to a large degree this is based on sort of extension of the agriculture expansion of the agriculture extension system achieving among the highest rates of extension agents to to farmers anywhere in the world um also to a degree some expansion of the use of improved inputs like fertilizers and improved seeds and so on um now this story's already been told and and discussed in in much of the literature I guess for me what's noteworthy and has been missed from that is that despite achieving very rapid agricultural growth the distributed there's distributive implications of that has largely been ignored and this graph is an attempt to kind of capture that so this is a rural household survey the gray bars of the population distributed by age and then the yellow parts are um the population that the people identified as a primary user of land within that survey which I've shortened to landholder and you've got the red line which is the yellow as a proportion of the gray so what it essentially shows is that at older generations beyond you beyond your early to mid 40s you've got that when the survey was taken you have got a pretty reasonable chance of gaining access of having access to land and agricultural livelihood that falls off precipitously below your early 40s and essentially the reason for that was that under the previous government under the dirt military government in the 1980s they had they had to take undertaken the original land reform in 1975 but it continued to redistribute land periodically um to take into account changing household structures and so on um so there've been relatively regular redistributions when the eprf death came into power they initially prevaricated about this weren't we're unsure what to do ultimately around the end of the 1990s beginning of the 2000s they put in place a series of reforms which basically prevented any future land redistributions essentially their concern was that in the context of rapidly growing population that you would end you if you carry on redistributing you're going to end up with smaller and smaller and smaller plots of land which ultimately are going to become economically unviable and they were persuaded to stop yeah basically put in place measures which prevented any future land redistribution now what that did obviously is that you know for for young adults reaching adulthood after um sort of say the late late 1980s it means that you have almost no no mechanism of achieving an agricultural livelihood you can you know put you can wait around and hope that your parents die and then hit your new inherit land um and there are very very limited reallocations of bits of commonly held land within within rural villages but you know large-scale land redistribution was no longer an access to a means of accessing a rural livelihood and the grey bar shows that obviously yeah so the black line is essentially a rough approximation it varied um in different parts of the country but a rough approximation of when the last land redistribution would have been so yeah it obviously falls off very rapidly and below that below that age so it essentially means that an entire chunk of people of young adults in the you know in the 2030s are denied access to a rural livelihood plus a very large body of people who haven't yet reached adulthood have you know become increasingly aware that there is no chance that agriculture will ever provide them with a livelihood given the size of the of the rural population and the and the young age of it um which all means that in terms of an agriculture you know essentially that agricultural growth is all accruing to people on the right hand side of that graph and enlarged excluding people on the left hand side which means that the imperative of industrialisation is is even even more acute and you know the government recognise this um from the early 2000s it put in place its first industrial serious industrial strategy where they selected a handful of economic sectors which they're going to focus off on in terms of manufacturing um again though you know their approach initially was very much based on this on on you know their interpretation of taiwan and career the idea that you could protect the domestic markets try and build up domestic capitalists um through through through um trade protections gradually nurture them provide them with the right incentives so that ultimately they will be able to move into exports and become globally competitive um one of those was the textile and apparel sector so the grey bars are um the exports with the the gray dots of the targets that the government set for exports yellow is employment and then employment targets in the diamonds and initially yeah this this sort of initial phase up to around 2012 was very much focused on domestic capital um trying to build up domestic firms setting up joint ventures with with with foreign investors in many cases to try and transfer technology the reality was that you know this was didn't didn't succeed um that they were the domestic firms just didn't have the capabilities of their capabilities to be able to enter into global value chains they struggled to secure secure contracts in the first place when they did get contracts they struggled with the you know demanding flexibility and cost requirements that um global investors um global lead firms required and ultimately yeah clearly they felt they felt well short of very ambitious government targets that were set and around 2013 there was a shift in strategy where the government instead of pursuing domestic capital realised that this wasn't going very well and and changed approach so from that point onwards the sort of central feature was in building industrial parks built by the chinese but state-owned industrial parks um which with the intention is then to persuade existing global value chains global lead firms to to move parts of their production to Ethiopia into these industrial parks as a means of exhilarating industrial industrial growth again there's been a bit there was a bit of an uptake there were certainly some major successes in that strategy in terms of persuading some major major textile firms to relocate production to Ethiopia and that got celebrated in and you know justifiably in many cases yet in terms of the overall picture in terms of the government's ambitions for the sector in terms of both exports and employment clearly it was still you know didn't have to have the chance to play out and and did not you know meet meet the government's expectations in that sense um you have a very similar picture in terms of leather and leather products um so here you've got a bit more detail in terms of the bars in terms of what is being exported so essentially you have a shift from the grey and the yellow on the left hand side which are raw and semi finished and yeah raw leather essentially um and then on the right hand side so i'm upgrading towards exporting semi finished leather and leather products um and yeah essentially as a result of government export bans where they where they prevented domestic firms from exporting um raw raw materials in in attempt to promote more greater processing internally um but again similar pattern of initially focusing on focusing on domestic firms which failed to really really capitalize on the on the incentives that the government were giving them and from the 2012-13 onwards a turn towards industrial parks um and and trying to persuade foreign investors to relocate so again you had some notable successes some Chinese shoe producers relocating to Ethiopia and and trying to set up production there um which which did you know noteworthy successes to it in a certain sense but again far short of government expectations in terms of what this was going to deliver um and then the last sector i'll look at is the sugar industry so in this case it was you know very much state investment um in in the in the sugar sector so state owned enterprises there was talk of points around getting foreign investors but doesn't seem to have been much demand so the state decided to pursue this itself invested vast amounts of money in a whole series across the country of sugar plantations and sugar factories and yeah of all the sectors this is probably the biggest disaster of the lot so you've got the grey bars basically showing pretty much flat production in terms of sugar um nowhere near the massive expectations in terms of government export targets so the idea was that they would be able to eliminate sugar imports um and that sugar the sugar sector would become a major source of foreign exchange earnings as a result of large-scale exports and this completely failed the yellow line is um sugar imports so in the context of growing demand you've you know sugar the sugars still become a it's become a major drain on foreign exchange um to to finance imports um and that in terms of the employment shares the result has been that there's been relatively little change so you've got the blue bar which is agriculture employment which has fallen to a certain degree to the extent that it has fallen that's mainly been absorbed by the service sector currently this is actually an overestimate of of the change within the agricultural sector in that a lot of that change has actually been a reclassification of domestic workers in rural households have been essentially moved from agriculture to services so it's kind of a something of an overestimate of how much you much change you've had in terms of employment shares but perhaps the key is the industry at the the yellow one at the bottom there aren't available data to separate out manufacturing employment but yeah industrial employment is relatively flat if you if you were able to separate out manufacturing you I think you'd find it would be a relatively small share of that in a lot of industry and industrial employment is actually in the construction sector and other things so this big push around manufacturing has actually translated into very little in terms of absolute terms of yeah the the share of employment um and this is then translated into just as you've had this of generational division and access to rural land and rural livelihoods you also have this generational division in terms of urban unemployment and so you've got the black line there is the total employment yellow is the total youth employment much higher um and then also yeah agenda division where where women tend to be much much more likely to be unemployed than men um now what this shows is essentially a drop in um unemployment initially and then stagnation from that point onwards again I think this is slightly misleading in terms of what the picture up to 2005 essentially a lot of that drop in unemployment would be to the government invested enormous amounts of money in micro and small enterprise schemes providing credit to groups of young people to do very basic low productivity low wage activities things like building building roads and breaking up stones to yeah build cobblstone roads um very small-scale trade activities and so on so you know in terms of reducing unemployment rates it was clearly had some success but in terms of actually delivering meaningful livelihoods which with with with future opportunities and yeah with potential for rising productivity much more limited and then from 2005 onwards lot basically stagnation in the unemployment rates but again in the context of a very rapidly growing population and a particular you know an urbanizing population so particularly rapid rapid growth in urban in urban population that's translated into an actual significant increase in the number of people who are unemployed in urban areas so more than doubling over the period from 2005 onwards both in terms of total unemployment and total youth unemployment so yeah I mean as I said earlier the you know this this government strategy was very much based on distribution trying to generate the distributive resources with which to keep people maintain political order maintain political stability but it was never just an assumption that you distribute resources and hope for the best and hope people go quiet it was always a what's there's a book called by Michael Albertus and colleagues called coercive distribution where they talk about this strategy of enmeshments where essentially regime authoritarian regimes distribute broadly as a means of tying people to the regime and it was very much this strategy in Ethiopia where it was distributing resources through party state structures in order to tie large sections of the population to the regime and yeah limit social unrest an enormous amount of effort was went into building local party state structures so in theory that OLA is the lowest level of the Ethiopian state um but beneath that this whole sort of assemblage of structures were put in place to organise and mobilise people so yeah each yeah every every five households came together to form a what what's called a one to five group with which had you know five households were in one leader again divided in terms of male female and youth one to fives the leaders of those one to fives then came together to form the development teams now in theory these had a developmental purpose and they were used for developmental purposes as well so the male teams predominantly in agriculture female teams predominantly around health but they were also fused with party political structures so you had a whole system of party cells where the leadership of these different groups were tended to overlap with one another and yeah from the perspective of a household you know were pretty much interchangeable um and pretty much every resource as a household that you every resource you could you you required particularly in rural areas but also to a degree in urban areas was filtered through these party state structures so still to this day all land is state owned in Ethiopia um agricultural inputs came through state affiliate affiliated cooperatives um extension services came from the state development agents which tended to work tended to work with the with the male male development teams um microcredit came from party affiliated micro finance institutions even food aid and social protection would be like allocated based on selection by by these different units so distributed down from the gallery level with quotas and lists put together by these teams so obviously you know this makes it incredibly difficult if you're if you're a rural household and every aspect of your livelihood that you rely on comes one way or another through the party state you're going to have strong disincentives to be yeah to question to question the government and and resist them the key challenge of course comes with the youth one to fives in that when in a kind of context where both the rural land land tenure regime and the urban employment um access um is both has this generational division we talked about in previous slides essentially the youth development teams never worked very well they were not always dysfunctional primarily because the state had very little to offer them engaging within these within these structures had very little material payoff to it and so you know there might have been some token support but yeah the youth development teams were never anywhere near as um influential as the male development teams and to some degree also the female ones so essentially you had a this of generational escape from the from this you know strategy of enmeshments um by the ruling party now even a yeah a distributed crisis only becomes a political crisis when you have a spark that sets it off um and that in in Ethiopia's case it was um the plans for the expansion of Addis Abba which was the sort of the key spark that ignited all of this so this map basically shows the expansion of Addis Abba over time so you've got the dark the black parts of the sort of old historical parts of Addis Abba the lighter gray you get is the more recent expansion so in the context of the ethnic federal system when it when it was set up in the 1990s Addis Abba was set up as a separate administrative unit entirely surrounded by Oremir but distinct from it um but with and that's the dotted line as the administrative administrative area that was allocated to Addis Abba at that time by you get to the by the time you get to the mid mid 2000s Addis has basically grown to the point where it succeeded the boundaries and used up pretty much all the land within Addis Abba and it's began to sprawl out along the main roads in and out of the city um and the government in its top-down way um it decided to launch this urban planning project called the Addis Abba well popularly became known as the Addis Abba master plan and that's what the coloured parts on that are so yellow is planned housing expansion out into into Oremir in the surrounding surrounding region purple is the interplanned industrial expansion so both new industrial investments but also relocating sections of industry from the inner city out to the periphery with yeah red the red line is the is the light railway it's plans for expansion of the transport network to be able to bring people in from these housing developments outside now the original decision to create Addis Abba as a separate administrative entity was itself controversial and had long been a sort of a flash point for Oremir nationalists the decision to then you know essentially what they you know this this urban technical urban planning approach which they employed to try and try and manage this process which yeah what was already happening in terms of an unplanned process of expansion to try and manage that and regulate that was widely interpreted in Oremir as being essentially a land grab of aroma land so essentially you by historical reasons Addis Abba has always been sort of a multi ethnic predominantly Amharic speaking city the rural countryside around is predominantly aromopharmers speaking Afan aromo so essentially what this plan involves is the displacement of aromopharmers by the multi ethnic city and that yeah was cast very rapidly as you know uh uh uh yeah expropriation of the aroma of aroma land and the loss of aroma land to the multi ethnic city and the exploitation of the eprdf and often tied in with a land with a you know a land tenure regime which yeah land could be given that was land was state owned and land was could be expropriated with very minimal compensation and essentially mean that meaning that farmers were very often left destitute by expropriated land um it attracted all kind all manner of corruption because yeah essentially you're taking land from a rural tenure system where land can't be bought and sold and and formally is valueless into an urban system where the there was an urban leasehold system where land could be bought and sold um and had enormously high value so that creation of rents inevitably attracted corruption as well so within that whole mix overlaid with ethnic divisions you've got a particularly explosive situation and essentially this yeah these maps show the spread of the protests so beginning in 2014 very much focused on western aromia and very much focused on the master plan and the plan and all the rumors about the master plan particularly initially went quiet as a result of mass government suppression um and but then exploded again in 2015 into 2016 across aromia initially then into amhara region and to a certain degree to other parts of the country as well and now alongside this you have um yeah major changes in the elite politics as well the the key factor being the death of melasanawy in 2012 so he'd you know managed to centralize power in the early 2000s when he passed away in 2012 that sort of reopened a whole set of grievances um and essentially these protests came about from 2014 onwards and I would say magnified the divisions that were beginning to exist within the ruling coalition so different parties within within the ruling coalition viewed these protests in very different ways and that's for the tplf this was seen as a major existential threat and a threat to the threat to their hold on power for the aromo and laterally the amhara parts of the ruling party this was you know these protests were seen as a tool for political that could provide political leverage with the tplf to you know resist what what had always been a somewhat subordinate status within the ruling coalition and so you started to see political leaders in some cases explicitly aligning themselves with the protesters but undoubtedly also sort of informally encouraging them at points in time um this is a statement by the oramia president lemo me gasa who's there with what's now the prime minister abhi ahmed his one time ally he said yeah why persist with costly street protests when we've made your demands our own if we fail to deliver i'll be back on the streets with you so a very clear attempt to align himself with the protests and capture this movement and ultimately you had an alliance between the aroma and the amhara branches of the ruling party was sufficient to force this regime regime change which eventually came about in 2018 um so in terms of just wrapping up i'm probably out of time i suspect um in terms of thinking through what the legacy of this developmental state era is so on the one hand there has been there was significant progress economic growth socioeconomic indicators infrastructure and so on but ultimately there's this legacy of a generational distributive crisis where yeah a whole generation of young adults lack agricultural um urban employment opportunities particularly problematic i mean that in itself is not necessarily unusual within africa but particularly problematic is the the way that this has then been framed but while it you could you know frame the frameless distributive crisis in generational or indeed class terms in terms of you know capitalistic and expropriating rural landholders it's been framed almost exclusively in ethnic terms as a result of the nature of the ethio open political system and the incentives provided by ethnic federalism at the same time as you've also had elite fragmentation along ethnic lines with a result that yeah rather than just an elite level conflict over competition for power that has then become abroad in a much more societal level conflict into which is which has forged long ethnic lines um which has led to you know the catastrophic um civil war on conflict that's been raging over recent years that then in turn i mean broadening out back to where i started a little bit i mean that has important implications for late late development much more broadly um in the sense that you know the eprdf i think most people would would argue that yeah in many sense the ethio open state is relatively well placed amongst late late developing countries in terms of having the authority and capacity to be able to deliver on state-led development far from perfect but relatively well placed you had for a period of time an elite which was focused very clearly on delivering rapid development yet ultimately was unable to to to achievement so it raises questions which many other people have asked about you know the feasibility of replicating anything like east asia economically but also politically like in terms of the political um incentives that drove east asian developmentalism and whether that's of yeah it is a viable strategy for contemporary authoritarian regimes to pursue development as a means of maintaining power that certainly is not the calculation that i would say most authoritarian contemporary authoritarian regimes have made on the whole they're much more focused on manipulating elections some degree of coercion and some degree of patronage so yeah i think you know ethio as one example where a regime did try and pursue that approach of yeah development as its meat is roots power i think it raises questions about how viable that is going forward um i'm going to stop there with just one as Naomi mentioned there is another book on its way on that ethiotis dam building that's the grand ethio open renaissance dam so it's basically a political history of dam building through from highly salasi through mele's to aviachafed taking in selini which is the Italian firm which has been building most of ethiotis dams obviously relations with with egypt and also metec the military engineering firm which we've got in broad within ethiotis dam building to catastrophic consequences and i will leave you with that which so the book is i'm not here to sell the books it's it's open access so if you follow that link in theory that will take you to a copy you can download thank you tom no i mean you know it's really fascinating but it's also really a bit depressing it's very depressing you're left with this feeling that you know if if Ethiopia couldn't do it as you say the the strength of the state capacity and so on where could and and so i i you know i'm not going to yeah sure i i got you i got you for a second i'm not going to use up my you know chair privileges just want to make sure you know you're you're going to monitor if there are questions coming online that does it need to be done here it's there okay so do you want should we sit down here and take the questions over there is that a good plan yeah and then you can monitor the questions from there and we're going to take a few questions at a time is that on now yeah can you hear me on yeah yeah we're going to get so we're going to take three at a time and chris i think you you look very urgently like you really need to ask the question so one two and a third one if there is another one let's start with you chris oh wait we need to give you the microphone though so that you can be here yes thank you no let's use the microphone zoom cannot hear you from there thank you very much yeah yeah tom that was lovely really really neatly done and and even though i have read for a bit of this and heard you talk before really interesting and thanks um and please send me an advanced copy of the dam's book but i thought i might just raise a few points if i may some of them probably naive some of them a little bit devil's advocate or angels advocate i don't know which it is um to counter what what uh Naomi picked up on the end uh at the end which was but it's very depressing and Ethiopia is a bit depressing right right now but i wonder if there's a a risk of falling into what in the latin american context is called fracasomania the kind of obsession with failure and weakness um everything kind of seems to be oh they didn't reach the targets and this and that and um you know you kind of put it in the global context at the beginning began to sound a bit like the sort of dany rodrick impossibilism story um well everybody else industrialized but africa can't do this and so on the world's too nasty and at the end Ethiopia seems to suggest that nobody else can do it either so um i i kind of i'm not 100% sure about this um firstly i think that uh one has to think about well what's the appropriate benchmark is there a world in which capitalist development is really nice and smooth and and and nice and and easy and linear and so on and and more specifically in terms of benchmarks should we be taking government targets really as the measure of what's happened in or seeing that in some of those things the slope was upward you know the things were changing in quite interesting ways but over a very very short period of time and structural change typically takes rather a long time um so so i i kind of you know that there was a question and that question in a way at its most extreme uh would lead to um possibly another argument which is what did you quote mella saying um the country will cease to exist unless we grow fast and share maybe he was really wrong about that and the reason it ceased to exist is because it grew and it shared because there really was a real expansion in Ethiopia there really was and i mean we can come back later and discuss the data i think you know as you said you can pick any indicator you can also pick any indicator in Ethiopia and question it that's another problem we all have with all our stories about Ethiopia but but is there a possibility that it was rapid growth and that much of that change was shared but unevenly shared education spread there was agricultural change the universities put here there and everywhere and stuff that that led to not so not only the demographic tension but also very very rapidly changing class dynamics rising inequality uh and that some of the dynamics of protest in a context of the history the national history and so on um had more to do with with that rather than abject failure across the board um i don't want to go on so i'm going to try and try and be very very quick the second thing is um you've got this model whereby which i love and i agree with a lot of it and know the literature you know there's there's a threat and the only way to survive in the context of a threat is to do development but one thing i want to give a bit more life to is the fact that the response to the threats wasn't inevitable and that we need to give a lot of attention to ideas and those ideas were really contested within Ethiopia and within the EPRDF within even the TPLF and between the leadership and its friends they were very careful to talk about their friends sorry the world bank and even worse the IMF and the Brits and so on other Brits and so on so forth is you know there were real tensions over policy and ideas and i think that's kind of a rather exciting part of the of the history um briefly on on land you told another depressing story about land which was actually very interesting and great slides but seems to be no scope for changing dynamics and the possibility of wage employment and past differentiation there as partly a driver of conflict but also a driver of livelihoods apart from having a tiny little lot of land if we're going to talk failures i wonder whether there's another one that you didn't talk about and it's food price manipulation which i think was really really serious part of this story and i could go on and i want to and i won't thank you you'll get another chance after that was quite a lot of questions so i don't know if you want to or points do you want to take those first and okay let's go to you yes and do introduce yourself please yeah my name is Oryng Jin from Korea and i'm studying in development i'm so glad that at least you talk of something success because during i'm studying and many people just say that we are imposed by the western powers we cannot do anything so i want to have one at least hope and then i know that they reduce this poverty from 69 to 27 within like 20 years so i have a very short three questions first of all edypio is very interesting country with a role of government but i want to know what makes difference between mangythus and melas gennawy to now a current government they must have failed many things and how they continue overcoming like i know some of my case in korea and then taiwan but second is like um maybe they can be you can say like elites and human resources second can be the the like how they deal with the deaths like you know chinese capitals and you know the many countries like kenya and they they lost their ownership of the trails but how do they pay back the debt and still financing like like i know that edypio and saving amount is not that great third like how what can be the strategy for the future not to stay in just production base or outsourcing country like a case of Bangladesh then uh what's the strategy to leap to the next level so that uh still growing um some good questions no so i i also have one so this is the third from this round or the ninth from this round i think it might be which is you know we talk about the you know the authoritarian developmental state and i'm old enough to remember when there was a moment of hope maybe pre 2005 when you know it was you know we we it wasn't necessarily going to be authoritarian what what what is the you know system what is the you know why why do we think it's inevitable that this authoritarian rule is here permanently what is the what is the you know what's changing here from what you see so let's uh go with these in whichever order you prefer yeah there's a lot there um so i guess the last one's perhaps the easiest one to answer i mean i think currently are prospects for democratisation in Ethiopia i think are pretty limited um the current government is entranced intent on entrancing itself on in power on pretty much to any cost going um and yeah elections happened but i'm not sure they mean enough a lot um i think the argument wasn't i think i mean looking back if you look back at the post-world war two era the countries that have achieved structural transformation have transformed have almost without exception been authoritarian the big successes now i it's a debate i try and sideline why haven't been getting too too too stuck into it about whether democracy is viable as a but compatible with structural transformation development i mean i think there are certain reasons why author it's the right authoritarian rulers with the right incentives may have it slightly easier but it's not a particular debate i wanted to get into um i think the prospects in Ethiopia are somewhat limited at the moment but yeah things change um we'll see um yeah i mean i don't in terms of presentation like this it's always a challenge even in a book it's a challenge to find the right balance and fit everything in certainly in 45 minutes it's it's a challenge so the government targets they're put there as as a device to sort of like show what to show where this fits with it with it with respect to government responsibilities and i think there's it's important to think through well what what would constitute progress in Ethiopia versus what the political incentives were and the political ambitions of the ruling elite were and those two aren't necessarily the same thing so there was progress undoubtedly it was nowhere near any of their targets and nowhere near what they felt you know they're as i you know my argument was that you know their strategy for maintaining power was based on structural transformation and mass employment creation so sum upward tick and i'd try to emphasize this that there were there were positive developments along the way does not meet their political ambitions of how they think they're going to keep you know tie people to the regime and keep keep people quiet so i think that distinction is important that even yeah progress progress what we more what i i would consider progress i think most people would consider progress and there was very real progress didn't translate into meeting sometimes fantastical ambitions in terms of what the targets were but the sort of their their view about how you how this massive social upheaval and i totally agree with you that yeah development isn't smooth and this social upheaval could be managed and controlled um however naive that that possibly was um so in terms yeah other i'm in terms of wage employment differentiation i mean i think so there has been a certain amount of particularly domestic investment investment also some degree sort of horticultural floriculture where you have had differentiation which yeah is not represented there it's in the book um and i think the big challenge is that that remains a quite a marginal sector of the Ethiopian economy and and in certainly in terms of numbers of people involved the mass the by far the majority of in terms of the population remains small holder agriculture and within that the land tenure system just doesn't allow for differentiation there are so such extreme risk constraints on buying and selling land and even renting land that there is yeah your your ability as an Ethiopian farmer to accumulate i think is quite limited um in terms of the next set of questions difference between Mengestu and Mullas um thank you Mullas and now okay oh so yeah before the government plan then it was a big failure even there was a famine many people died because of hunger now the government seems functioning so what makes the difference the government seems functioning now i mean yeah like it's a strong government but like government before the government plan was totally wrong they these are angry the farmers from north to south and then that was a big failure but there was a famine going on now though yeah yeah i know like this so but still it's better than before right i would say currently this government is focused on nothing but maintaining power in the coming weeks coming months i wouldn't have said it i said it's completely dysfunctional like there is inattention to industrial policy agriculture anything other than maintaining power and who they're fighting currently to keep the yeah to try and prevent themselves from losing power so i wouldn't describe the current situation as remotely functional i think there was an important difference between the Mengestu and sort of mele's era in the well one was ideological so yeah state-owned state-ownedship control command economy versus at least some degree of an embrace of a capitalist economy um uh yeah and and i you know and and i think yeah Mengestu didn't lack this idea that development was going to be the central focus of what he was doing again he were he thought you know his entire time in office was fighting a whole range of different competing revolutionary groups there was never a moment of stability like yeah resources were continually being funneled into the military to fight and maintain power and there was a brief period where that wasn't the case and the Ethiopian government was able to yeah i think under the military undoubtedly but not to the same extent and we're able to focus on other things as well so you can defeat those are different kind of authoritarian right yeah um how they're going to pay back the debt i think is a question that no one knows i think the chinese have pretty much given up on the idea that they're going to pay back most of those debts um but yeah the debt crisis has become a major major issue i mean part of this i mean my my sense would be that as this process was gradually unraveling and this is probably more more more from the second book rather than the first one the politicians became increasingly ambitious about the scale of infrastructural projects that they were pursuing in the hope that yeah mega projects would outpace the sort of the crisis that was brewing and as a result of that it well not only they first of all they bypassed technical capacity what capacity there was it became politically driven infrastructure projects rather than anything involving real you know insight into what you know efficiency and so on but also yeah accumulated massive massive state debts which i suspect probably won't be i won't won't be payable um including dams so whose financing that big dam the one you the one to move about uh good question um in theory it's it's it's funded by Ethiopia um and to us to a degree it certainly is i think there's a lot of commercial loans essentially underwriting it which of yeah expensive loans getting increasingly expensive yeah um gosh gosh okay uh yes would you like to introduce yourself so we know he will oh and also the microphone sorry i'll get used to this is hi everyone i'm so i'm on a student here so as and my question was what do you see for a future of the curd do we see a future of us actually transitioning to making money into Ethiopia and also the rest of supplying electricity for Africa that was i think one of the biggest goals um a future of seeing actual economic change in other African countries and refocusing and focusing on ourselves as Africa as a whole and then also for the future of Ethiopia's government what does a transition into um new leadership look like we've talked about us always putting ethnicity before and why a lot of the parties are not trusting each other and even how all these protests have been um happening and influencing everyone's feelings towards leadership so what does a transition into new leadership look like great thank you and this so the person in front of you thank you thank you hi i'm Thomas i studied development studies um i was somewhat sort of long-winded question that probably doesn't have an answer but um just go for it yeah okay this here thoughts on a potential future government which you know there is no signs of someone coming in either near future but um how they may potentially use a developmental state slash industrial policy to bring about some form of ethnic cohesion national cohesion um like if a Kagame Rwanda kind of approach to the country would rest some of the conflicts to build somewhat of a national identity and potentially provide a point for the economy to regain some of that growth and the commons. Thank you. Thank you Tom. I think we've discussed these things before just a couple of reflections going back to to Chris's point I think one of the main question marks is the timing of of all these different crises uh when you when you take some of your yeah analytical categories of distributed pressures um you know some of basic structural conditions that you refer to what could argue that they were all present in 1990s arguably in the 1990s the fragility of the system was also there as it was just you know being born and towards the end of of of that decade you know you have a vicious war with Eritrea um so really the question remains and why now well why the crisis now i've been up to 2018 or 2020 and not them uh what what's really the trigger and I think you know Chris has has a point that it is precisely the sort of dynamism and rapid change and and also the the visibility of development for most people I mean you're not least in terms of the construction boom infrastructure construction uh that has been unprecedented by um historical by African standards is certainly also by Ethiopian standards uh was was an important trigger and and one thing that we did find I mean we were doing research at that time in 2016-17-18 in those industrial parks and employment in the construction sector and so on and I think at that time there was there was class politics going on at the workplace and despite the the you know ethnic framing of a lot of the battles and in fact a lot of the labor conflict which we observed and we which we've written about and particularly in factories where real labor conflicts are real examples of collective action around labor grievances precisely because of mismatch between the expectations generated by these very rapid development and change and the realities that a lot of people were finding when they were getting those jobs in the first in the first place I think that is something that needs to be answered in there and then there's the question of the opportunism of those who were in this in this coalition to take advantage of some of these different types of conflict to politicize them and to give them an ethnic framing which then at some point gets out of control so I think understanding that timing is fundamental which I think when we were doing that research to be honest I think everyone would say well this is a ticking bomb but it's always difficult to say well when is that going to explode is it tomorrow in a five years time or ten years time but everyone was aware of the fragility of that political settlement that fragility was not was there then but also was there in the 1990s and those pressures that you've been talking about were also there in the 1990s but it's really that sort of dynamism the inequality the inflation the huge differences between different areas of the country some areas really seeing deep pockets of growth and development and other areas not seeing them yeah so I think that's in a sense a kind of reflection I've come after many years of doing that on that time and trying to understand that through that sort of lens. What kind of factories with these with these the many? With the environment primarily in the industrial parts especially in Hawassa but also in Bukham which is one of the areas on the eastern industrial zone which you were talking about around the ADIs of the plan and just a final point also I think you know one of the major challenges that Ethiopia's faced for a long time and certainly that affected the performance of it was the balance of pavement constraints you know that's always been a hit in the economy the government always trying to catch up with the with these challenges never really managing to to fulfill those those promises and that really was was a major a major drag and just a final point is ideas matter I think for those of us who are interested in industrial policy in other areas of Africa there was one thing that really characterized the 2012 to 2018 period was the incredible degree of coherence in trying to establish some form of plan that built the basic conditions for industrialization you know whether it was and it wasn't just about attracting foreign investment it was also about the electricity you know which is a basic aspect of you know attracting industrial investment education so the basic the massive improvement in levels of basic education in the previous 10 15 years and the other elements of infrastructure it's really hard to find out any other country in the conditions that Ethiopia was facing in the 2000s that were able to achieve those three things in 20 years if it's if it's directly related yeah yeah I was just going to say though this ideas matter point I always think this is something that the you know you guys effective states inclusive developments that you were always going on about this ideas matter it's very interesting to hear this being phoned to you as a you know as a challenge you know where are your yeah you will really agree with Carlos his point about the foreign exchange constraint because that actually led the government I think to to to interfere with certain interest groups which was part of the conflict I think but but I wanted to ask you whether there's sort of two more dimensions one is the discussion the presentation sort of emphasises the disenfranchised youth etc but how much of the conflict the protest was actually elite driven was top down you just briefly mentioned it in our research we came across that in Oremia quite a lot before it all you know around from 2010 onwards to 2016 or so and the other dimension I was just thinking about a little piece of field work I was doing in the upper awash valley was to what it and Carlos is partly a question for you as well in Moasa era and so on is to what extent was the agenda dimension to the violence given so many of the jobs in those parks in the large farms in the upper awash valley etc in the farms near Debrazade etc were women's and they were relatively easy to attack so I think of course the parallelist text sounds yeah well have you got enough questions there for you oh did you get okay should we should we take this one more yeah tom I had a question okay in that case if there's two or three more we'll do this round and then we'll do I think a final round after that yeah there's a couple more there's the the the chat there and and to go out the front there yeah I mean so it's a short presentation it's a 330 page book I don't disagree with anything you said I think yeah the timing is important undoubtedly it was I think there's a lot of reasons why 2018 and not 1990 not the 1990s I think ethnicity was very different in 2018 to what it was in the 1990s federalism undoubtedly did have an impact of politicising ethnicity in a way and making ethnic ethnic identity important in a way that it wasn't in the 1990s or going back to the 1980s and yeah the central means by which you engage with the state education is undoubtedly hugely important in that you know it's not just a generation which don't have opportunities but it's also generation which is the best educated generation that there's ever been which has translated into rising expectations both for them and their families that you know we've invested in this in any in your educational these years there's nothing to show for it or very little to show for it and that sort of contributes to frustration and like you know people like Marko de Nuncio and Daniel Mines have done really good sort of ethnographic studies of looking at the frustration that comes along with that but yeah of rising aspirations but yeah the opportunities of missing and I think you know in that sense you know the progress and essentially I mean that's the argument is that you know inequality and people being bypassed by developmental successes is key to this whole story so yes there was undoubtedly I tried to mention it but like perhaps didn't emphasise it enough but class politics is the central part of that alongside generational divisions and yeah rest assured your work is cited extensively in that chapter in relation to the industrial parks and labour and so on I mean yeah again ideas I mean ideas are present in that again you have to sort of pick and choose what you're going to emphasise I mean I think I think the argument that I tried to make in the book is that ideas ideas are hugely important ideas alone are not sufficient in that you know if you have a political context which is not supportive of a regime pursuing structural transformation having the idea in itself is not going to do and do not going to deliver you need some of the structural factors in place in terms of state capacities relationships with between the state and different sections of the population within that context I think undoubtedly Mela's ideas and other people's ideas around how you develop industrial strategy development strategy and so on were hugely important and hugely influential but yeah I think it comes back to that question that you know yeah if Mela's had been dropped in a different country he might have may have had the right ideas but he wouldn't have been able to do anything and so I think it's you know try and understand where the context of where ideas can become influential and can really resonate is hugely important. Sort of wonder then why ideas if the context is not right but anyway. How can they be the right ideas if you're in charge of everything and your ideas are not anyway. I have other questions to answer. I'm working my way through slowly I mean the good yeah the danger of putting the slide up is they end up talking about another book which I haven't presented about is the good what's the good going to do if the good will undoubtedly massively enhance electricity generation capacity to a much lesser degree it will increase energy generation capacity which is important distinction which is one of the basic problems with the good in that it is capable of producing vast amounts of electricity for a short period of time there isn't enough water to be able to run the good at full capacity all the time so it will be important but it's not going to have anywhere near the effect that it's been portrayed as having the other aspect to it is just the electricity grid that you know the narrative has been this is going to solve Ethiopia's problems everyone's you know they're going around afar from field work that we did telling people they're going to instantly have electricity and this is you know this is they're going to be connected the reality is that they're not and that the expansion of the grid is a much well a task which is equally as big as building the good it's originally so and yeah is much less advanced so it will have some positive impacts um but in terms of mass yeah universal electrification it's not going to achieve it anytime soon um and yeah exports is a big challenge I mean there will be some they've started exports I think to Kenya now finally um the challenges that most countries within East Africa and powerful share Ethiopia's ambitions of exporting electricity and they're all investing in electricity generation so there's going to be challenges about who's buying who's electricity and whether there is a market for it there the big prize would be exporting to Egypt and Sudan and that is tied up within lengthy negotiations obviously about the the dam and its operation so it's yeah politically fraught and some way off yeah so it will have positive impacts undoubtedly but it's probably not quite as much as the narrative suggests a second question yeah so Thomas um did you have a second question um yes i'm just about the transition into I guess it's similar yeah related I think in terms of the future I mean I think will the developmental state be rehabilitated under another regime which I think was part of your question I think so the reforms that have been talked about and not yet really implemented I think would unpick the developmental state entirely so the the world banks come in as you know replace requirements in terms of liberalizing the financial sector liberalizing the electricity sector doing all of these different things if they actually implemented that and they've made some promises and it's kind of stalled around the conflict then it would be a it would have to be a very different development strategy completely different and I think for the financial sector if they go down that route would be the key that you know once you've liberalized your financial sector you're probably never going to get it back and the financial sector was such a key tool for all of this investment that underpin this process so there is a bit of a critical juncture about what they do in the next coming years it's not really clear abby's pretty opaque as to what his priorities really are he talks about the private sector periodically he's made lots of promises he's done actually relatively little in terms of liberalization bits and pieces around the edges so it yeah it remains to be seen quite what route they go go down in the future I think yeah I mean I think the key ethnicity is an important question that you know the country is currently extremely fragmented following the conflict I mean yeah I wouldn't necessarily advocate a Kagami I'm not sure that's necessary the way to go but like how do you how do you put that together back together and like can you create an Ethiopian political system that is truly federal and truly but yeah combined with peace and stability or do you need to go back for a centralization and find some way of yeah putting it all back together I yeah I don't know it's a it's a very difficult question to ask it's not obvious what the solution would be um and yeah Ethiopia tends to make me look a bit of a fall when I make predictions so I'm not going to um we have a couple more questions I think would you like to yeah good evening everybody my name is Bill, my students are doing my masters here at Sowers in Development Studies just a quick question one what how much would you any thoughts on the regional challenges when it comes to Ethiopia's failed table I think as I pictured it's probably only Kenya and Djibouti around the region that have been stable throughout that whole period and I always wonder why in Africa we never see the flying geese model of countries undergoing structural transformation and having spillover effects on their neighbors make some synergy between Kenya and Ethiopia and my second question is just out of curiosity these industrial parks were they good unionizable jobs or they were just basically sweatshops that Ethiopia was trying to grab on to just any form of the rank of the ladder of global value chain then then maybe work themselves up from there yeah great questions and there's somebody there at the front there just in front of you yeah thank you um hi hi my name's Salma Al Samarai I'm actually Naomi's husband and also I'm at the World Bank and just moved to to Ethiopia so this has been really fascinating um I just wanted to go back a little bit on the history of uh of the development model that you were discussing and I mean you I think you presented kind of a mixed picture a little bit that there's been some fundamental you know fundamental and massive successes I mean the poverty rates that one of the audience picked up on it is truly kind of remarkable but I just and so there were some and then there were some you know disasters in terms of the policies that were taken up but I just I just wondered if I mean what your view is in the sense of is it that the the whole sort of the the policies that were adopted and taken up uh were just the wrong policies and it was the wrong kind of model of state-led development that you're talking about or was it that the that the emphasis in some parts was wrong or that it was just the way that the emphasis was wrong or the capacity of the state to be able to implement in the areas that it uh it had chosen as as being you know these particular areas were were the wrong ones and I mean I guess what I'm trying to ask is are you saying that the the whole idea of this kind of state-led development model that Ethiopia pursued it it is just not won't achieve the goals that it laid out for itself or was it merely the the implementation of that policy that was that wasn't as good as it potentially could have been. Yep okay um the regional challenges I mean yeah I think I seem to recall Melis himself saying that they're in a rough neighbourhood or something and that certainly doesn't help and I think that's undi- undeniably true I mean yeah to have flying geese I guess you need an initial goose um and yeah I think his well his aspiration was that they would be the first and everything would follow from them and Ethiopia would sort of dominate the whole region um yeah I mean it's it is not helped by the instability and I think what's happened in I think partially partially fortuously partly through astutes foreign policy they were able for a period to manage the regional tensions quite well um and stay avoid getting drawn into conflicts in with neighbouring countries or yeah or in the case of Somalia insert themselves but wasn't terribly detrimental um to to what was going on internally and I think what's happened since has been that yeah partly as a result of being drawn into yeah debt crisis and being drawn into into the sort of the orbit of the UAE and Saudi Arabian partly through yeah picking yeah some poor foreign policy choices and picking fights with people they didn't need to pick fights with they've got stuck into that what was previously the pattern of you know back and forth conflicts with many of their neighbours and getting drawn into that which I think has been extremely unhelpful um in the industrial parks I mean talk to Carlos about it he's done more research on it than I have I mean I would say that basically the initial strategy was based on an explicit idea that one of the key things Ethiopia Ethiopia had was really cheap labour and so that was what was sold to foreign investors come and invest like our labour cost we can we can give you yeah nice nice shiny industrial parks cheap rents and and cheap labour and you bring it bring you bring in your investment I think yeah Carlos's research essentially showed that that became problematic that you know people didn't want you know people who came into the parks didn't want to stay in the jobs because it was you know they became huge amounts of turnover because they were made promises around the industrial parks that then weren't delivered you then had a whole series of sort of well both turnover of labour also wildcat strikes and various different things and there's been an attempt to some degree to rethink that model and you know to some degree raise raise raise labour standards but I think that's what from my understanding it's very much work in progress actually Tom there was a related question about gender that actually I think is relevant at this point yeah I mean I I personally don't think the industrial parks should be have too much of a causal so in terms of yeah the employment so there is a gender dimension which is probably underexplored in the book but you know undoubtedly in terms of unemployment rates women they are much worse than men do also in terms of rural land access women fair much worse than men do yet as you say in terms of flora culture industrial parks and so on there's this narrative about nimble fingers but also probably compliant labour where women have been massively favoured in terms of these industrial employment in terms of absolute numbers though that form of employment still is relatively small compared to the size of the population the size of the sizes the numbers of people that we're talking about so how I don't know I have no idea but I I'm doubtful about how much you know women being given jobs in in in these enterprises would be a sort of a major flashpoint but perhaps I'm missing something but yeah there is undoubtedly a gendered element to employment and and these grievances in terms of yeah are these the wrong policies are they about lack of capacity um I mean I think going back to what I said earlier the progress that's happened is undeniable so whether they're the wrong policies no I mean I think some things undoubtedly failed some things were successful some things that failed they they changed their approach and tried something else and it worked a bit better so I don't yeah in terms of sweeping out the whole thing and saying no this was the wrong policy I think is not the way the answer again capacity I mean well so yeah things like sugar industry that was clearly poorly thought out and that you know in those senses there are certain certain sectors where there are certain sectors whether I think they probably got it more or less right or at least came to something that was a policy eventually which was more or less right in other things like the sugar sector it was just poorly thought out from the beginning it was politically driven it was this sort of yeah vast sort of ambit overly ambitious projects which never really stood much of a chance alongside that a complete mismatch between ambitions and capacity deliver so in the sugar sugar factories a lot of it was contracted out to METEC this military engineering company which you know there's been all kinds of allegations around corruption since then including a relation to the good it's unclear to me quite how much of the problem was corruption but what undoubtedly they were incompetent and were not able to have didn't have anything like the capacity that was required to deliver on this vast range of projects that they were that they were allocated and big expected to build sugar factories all over the country to you know highly technical aspects of the dam and so on and they just weren't up to it that's said I mean I think the argument in the book is that at least part of this story beyond I mean Korea Taiwan they all made mistakes China makes mistakes in terms of policies they you know industry you know there's a big literature about how industrial policy is about learning that you try something doesn't work you tweak it you try something else eventually you get towards something that works I think they're and you know there was things like the focus on domestic capital I think probably was a bit poorly thought out that it probably didn't really fit with the way that the global economy currently functions but at the same time if they had gone down a foreign and industrial part foreign investment routes in the late 1990s early 2000s would that have come off at a time when I mean the basically they're capitalising now or trying to capitalise on rising labour costs in China and sort of some export of industry so I think there are constraints from the global economy structural constraints which makes it very difficult to have been able to do anything like if they tried something tried what the industrial park strategy which they later hit upon which delivered some successes I remember talking to Nawai Gowraab the prime minister's one of the primary key prime minister's advisor he was sort of saying oh well my one regret would have been maybe we should have tried some of these things earlier and I my suspicion is that even if they had tried any things earlier you know the global economy wouldn't have enabled Ethiopia to launch into that at that point so I think there are some structural problems which means that regardless of the policy mistakes and the capacity limitations it yeah I'm not convinced that it would have been feasible to global structural problems yes okay gosh that's a bit right do we have any other burning questions here I wonder if you want to pick up again over this question of ideas because I I'm quite curious about it you did just say right now about the the idea of the the very cheap labour being you know one of the you know the biggest assets I guess if you like the Ethiopia had and I I just remembered meeting a a bummer there she garments factory owner who had invested several tens of millions of dollars in factory in in Ethiopia very yeah that's the guy but you know my heart is not meeting for him because he was also the same guy who said when we were talking about the idea of a living wage for Bangladeshi garments workers he scoffed at the idea that garments workers should be entitled to a living wage so it strikes me that this is one of those old ideas that we have lots of cheap labour so we should just go for the very bottom end of the market is not necessarily one of the best ideas and it turns out that Ethiopia really was not one of the best ideas so yeah I mean I they got some initial investment investors there how much of it was to do with initial promises of cheap labour I'm not really sure I think it quickly became apparent that focusing only on cheap labour was not a viable strategy long term and I think to some degree there's a recognition of that um but yeah what there I mean I get what the challenge is that the the the sections of value chains and the value chains they're moving they've been trying to move into there isn't you know there's cost margins and minuscule in terms of apparel yeah so how much leeway you have to raise wages I mean that's the challenges that you need to move out of you might it might be a stepping stone it's unclear whether it's a stepping stone to anything else but like you quickly need to move out into into higher value activities in order to in order to raise rise raise living standards um Vietnam did though yeah Cambodia has done the problem we have in the case of Ethiopia is is the time frame yeah and it's very difficult to judge when you know many of these companies for example to take a how was that which was a flagship example they really started in 2017 the operation started and it is only up to 10 years 15 years that you can judge to what extent that sector really is expanding and developing what these companies usually do when they when they arrive is you know I mean cheap labor is meaningless what matters is the unit labor cost and for all of them I think at the start in 2017 what they were all saying is that the initial efficiency levels were at 15 20 percent of the benchmark with Vietnam of that time being 85 90 percent and some of the top factors in China 100 percent yeah so there were actually labor wasn't cheap in Ethiopia in 2017 they were not competitive not even compared to Bangladesh but they knew because they had gone through many of these companies had invested in Cambodia and in many countries were actually had some similarities with Ethiopia they were not particularly worried even upon the labor turnover issue not particularly on border because they always say this is a matter of three five years as long as the environment is stable these things these these problems will disappear you know we're confident of course you're right that profit margins the the sourcing squeeze all these are structural elements of the global garment industry but it doesn't mean that they cannot succeed even in a country like Ethiopia the problem is that you know the crisis and the experiment that happened precisely when they were starting to you know move up and wages have been rising by the way you know more than you know 40 something percent in a matter of three three years in the middle of this crisis so they're not like wages have perhaps say stuck months it's the later that we've got from the industrial parts so it's it's just a shame that all these exploded within four years of many of these operations started and on the sweatshop thing I have to say that that if there was one thing that the government was very keen on was precisely to avoid the accusation of sweatshop and this is why they committed to build those industrial parts in the way they were built very different from no run of plazas yeah absolutely no intolerable but um you mean even we increase wages of our employees but still industry stays there that there must be some advantage but of course and and the fact that I mean there has been one shocking thing for me to say is how resilient many of these investors have been I mean the fact that some of these investors haven't packed and gone like two three years ago it's it's a mystery but actually the one thing that really made the difference was agor the suspension of agor agor was you know one of the reasons why some of these exporting firms set foot in these industrial parts because they have access to the US market portably anti the war caused the suspension of agor basically because of the response of the US government and the suspension still there okay and even the workers themselves are so aware of this their bargaining power now has been so affected by the go because that is the narrative of management in most of these factors there's no way we're going to increase your wages it's really cool agor is the Africa Growth Opportunity Act which allows African countries to export water free and tariff free manufacturers to the US market so it means that many Asian firms it's not just Chinese that in fact they should come there and they get an advantage given the profit margins how squeezed they are this kind of incentive actually matters okay so it makes sense for them to to to invest in a country like Ethiopia plus the added advantage of maybe Africa branding which a lot of global buyers wanted okay so they had these advantages now either agor suspension at the crisis in the US markets all that disappears and that really is the trigger for many of these firms now living rather than the war or you know the COVID pandemic was almost negligible impact but you don't think there are two problems of inclave economy and human capital increase then and they stay as a production base and why you can't stay as a production base in South America yes I can how many countries I started with to take some of that pretty much every industrialising country started from there that's right so I think we've moved to the stage of the evening where we're we're heading towards the bar I think in this stage to have a conversation over there so I'm gonna if there's no further burning questions for Tom I think that's what we'll do is we'll head in the first was that was that a question yes there is one burning question would you like the would you like the microphone this I think Alyssa has the microphone there my green throw and I do like water history amongst other technology status stuff so I'll be excited about your other book I wonder in terms of the ideas what about the ideas in terms of social movements that obviously there's a huge social movement activity if you end up with war but there's also social movements that were possibly opposed to war what social movements can either be engaged with having a strategy for development or they can be just resentful in trying to stop government doing things what was what where does the ideas of people in potentially conflict with the government come into a development theory because it seems this is a very much what did the elite do and can you justify that or that you shouldn't deal with that is our social movements that are deal with authoritarian governments irrelevant to the economic development or our social movements more relevant in less authoritarian or more so how where would you put those that people's ideas that fit the not just the ideas of elites but the ideas of the non elites the people who are organizing in factories the people who are trying to get new land or develop a movement and say to their neighbors what how can the government help us okay sure um I don't think context is important in that so going back to the 1990s initial you know I think a lot is depends on where Ethiopia was at that point and where it come from that post revolution essentially yeah yeah capitalist class had been wiped out there was you know rural agriculture was relatively flat in terms of class structure there wasn't sort of and and post civil war you know they you know the government fought to power their way to power militarily they didn't face major opposition from society essentially one way another even when they took power they operated relatively freely at that point in time um social and and actively you know as you know the argument here is that they actively sought to control and suppress independent movements outside the party structure so I think there was this you know from their view it was sort of the revolutionary democratic idea of you know that they are the vanguard and they're sort of mobilizing the population the flip side to that is obviously that they were yeah controlling and limiting discussion outside of party structures in in any meaningful way as time went on as well the economy developed as divisions became a more apparent both ethnic generational class I think you do get to see moments where social movements were able to express themselves in particular ways so 2005 was a big one in terms of opposition around the opposition around that election split between on the one hand a sort of a very net Ethiopian nationalist countering the sort of ethnic federal at federal line another part which was more ethno nationalist countering whether the government had really implemented this sort of ethnic autonomy that it claimed to be pursuing um and more recently yeah and it's been within the context of a federal system which politicizes ethnicity within the context of yeah regional elites who are actively seeking to mobilize people and manipulate people that is the narrative has very much been around in terms of anti-government protests has been an ethno nationalist predominantly and the idea that this was a regime which was purely Tigray and dominated favoring Tigray. Now I think there are depending where you look you can find some support for that in places but as a overarching narrative that this was just a regime which was favoring Tigray I think I have yet to see anything that is really clear on that but yeah it's become as most things in Ethiopian politics it's become purely or predominantly ethno nationalist in terms of the framing for those and I think one of the interesting things is you know these divisions were deep rooted they're widespread I think it could have been in another universe you could have had a had social movements which were organized along generational or class lines the reality was that they were only ever organized on ethnic lines so periods you had sort of both Amhar and Aromo movements periodically they would collaborate they would sort of express support for one another when the when the when the militaries were suppressing or the federal police were suppressing one of the other social movements but there was never any hint that you would have in Ethiopian social movements which was to it to resist the government it was always an ethically organized one and I think yeah I think that's the one of the key problems that now exist is how do you work with a context in which politics is cleaved along ethnic lines and it's yeah it's far from clear how you go beyond that and or even work with it because it becomes about ethnic elites competing for national power and mobilizing yeah their ethnic groups in pursuit of that good well I think we're going to leave it there now because we've exhausted Tom and asked him lots very very long and difficult questions thank you so much Tom thank you we appreciate it before I let you all go though we have several more really quite fascinating seminars in this series coming up the next one there's actually three in March don't ask me I didn't I didn't decide on these dates but the next one is the launch of a book and there will be a reception afterwards and actually that's not the right room Ingrid do you know the right room is it it's in the Brunei gallery so please come to that that will be really interesting if you're interested in these issues of conflict and humanitarian disarmament and Mary Calder will be speaking at that as well so that will be very interesting and we have as you see on the right side a bunch more really fascinating speakers thank you so much Tom that was really excellent I think we're probably going to head to the bar for a quick one now if anyone would like to join us and continue the conversation so thank you so much for coming