Political Factors Effecting Development
Having spent the past couple of lessons considering the way in which development is a contested concept and evaluating some of the many different ways we can measure development indicators, we are now going to turn our attention to some of the factors that promote and inhibit development. We will begin by considering political factors. Obviously, we could group many different reasons under the heading 'political' but, in order to keep it simple, we will look at poor management, corruption and political instability (including conflict).
You will be allocated to a group - either (1) Poor management, (2) Corruption or (3) Political Instability. You will have 40 miuntes to produce a single group mind-map that explains the key issues and shows how your allocated factor affects development. You may use the sources given below as well as your own sources but you must be able to provide contemporary global examples and be ready to share your finds with the rest of the class. Each group will have 10 minutes to share their findings and lead a whole class discussion.
Poor Management:
Governments need to do lots of things to encourage development – they need to build and maintain infrastructure, and raise and spend finance wisely, on the right projects. When governments are inept at managing infrastructure, development is impossible. Nobody wants to build a factory in a city where the power could go out at any time.
They also need to set up their laws and business practices in a way that encourages investment and initiative, that protect businesses and individuals legally, and that honour property rights, contracts and copyrights.
o give you one example, in Madagascar I used to visit street-side music shops as a child. You could go up to the booth, tell them what you want, and then come back in an hour to pick up the audio tape they’d quickly dubbed for you from their catalogue of crackly Michael Jackson, Elton John, and Bob Marley tapes. This worked fine up to a point, but there was no incentive for investment in music studios or record labels, because the absence of intellectual property laws meant nobody ever paid you for what you created. It would be much harder to develop a local music industry of any kind under these conditions, or for Madagascar to participate in the global culture industries (see source here)
Corruption:
If you have ever lived in a country where corruption is rife, you will now how frustrating, dis-heartening and fundamentally dis-empowering corruption can be. Tim Harford describes corruption in Cameroon, in his book ‘The Undercover Economist‘. While the most obvious perpetrators are crooked policemen or customs officials, which everyone knows about, they are the tip of the iceberg. Red tape is where real endemic corruption happens – a slowing and over-complicating of simple processes, from starting businesses, buying or selling property, to the law courts, all require ridiculous amounts of paperwork, interviews, visits to ministry offices. in the Cameroon courts in 2001, when it was rated the world’s fifth most corrupt country, chasing an unpaid invoice took 58 separate procedures . Says Harford: ‘Every procedure is an opportunity to extract a bribe. The slower the standard processes, the greater the temptation to pay ‘speed money’.’ Imagine having to bribe your telephone company and all your utility companies, paying an aside for your driver’s license and to pass your exams. Imagine having to bribe the post office every time you bought something by mail order, bribing the bank clerk to let you take money out of your own account, paying your doctor to give you a prescription, and then the chemist to give it to you. That’s the reality of endemic corruption, the abuse of power at every level. It takes strong leadership to fight it, but it can be done (see sourcehere)
Political Instability:
Finally, political instability plays a role in why some countries remain poor. This could be ethnic tension, tribalism, or all out war. Needless to say, countries with long-term conflicts such as the ones in Somalia or Afghanistan, have little chance of developing. Other nations such as Sri Lanka, have simmering ethnic divides that are a constant distraction, de-stabilising the region and discouraging investment. (see source here)