Presentation
If development is to be judged by the ability of developing countries to catch up with the developed world and reduce poverty, then performance over recent decades has been mixed. Some countries, notably in Asia and China in particular, have achieved undeniable success. On the other hand, living standards in Latin America have remained more or less on a par with the world average, while several countries in sub-Saharan Africa have seen their initial backwardness worsen. As a proportion of the world's population, poverty has decreased. But in terms of the absolute number of poor people, it is only in the last few years that it has begun to decline. In both cases, this progress is due above all to the exceptional performance of China, where the number of poor people has fallen by around 400 million in the last 20 years! Today, 1.3 billion of the planet's inhabitants live in destitution on less than €1 per person per day, in developed countries' purchasing power, to subsist, and 80% of them live in the Indian peninsula or on the African continent.
What can we conclude from this observation? Most certainly that the quest for a universal recipe to ensure the economic take-off of developing countries has not been crowned with success. Today, only a handful of countries can point to real results. Yet the way in which economists, practitioners and policy-makers approach development issues has changed profoundly, without any noticeable acceleration in poverty reduction outside the cases cited. 40 or 50 years ago, macroeconomic modelling and planning dominated the nascent discipline of development economics. How much should be invested, in which sector or which infrastructure, to guarantee an annual per capita GDP growth rate of x% for the next 5 or 10 years? The development approach then evolved to give the market and policies to encourage private initiative their rightful place, without however, outside periods of favourable international conditions, seeing a notable acceleration in the growth of living standards throughout the developing world. Today, the questions facing researchers and decision-makers are of a completely different nature. For many of them, they concern individuals and households, their living conditions and how to improve them, much more directly than in the past. How can we effectively transfer additional purchasing power to the poorest, how can we encourage school enrolment, how can we improve the effectiveness of primary education? Do microcredit programs really have a significant impact on poverty? What is the impact of a mosquito net distribution program on malaria? For others, the focus is more on the role of institutions and that of political and economic elites, and their more or less "developmentalist" character. We'll have to wait and see whether this new approach will lead to progress and to developing countries catching up more evenly with the rich countries.
Does this mean that the economics and practice of development has been nothing more than a series of trials and errors, some of which have indeed led to success, but the vast majority of which have produced only very average results? Should we go so far as to think, as some people do, that development economics is purely and simply a failure, that we have learned nothing from national development experiences as they have unfolded in real time over the last 50 years, and that the "knowledge" we have accumulated in the fight against poverty is minimal, or even non-existent? Is the best we can do today simply to help the world's poorest, by providing them with additional purchasing power and guaranteeing their children's education and good health, while giving up on promoting an economic dynamic that would gradually enable individuals and families to become self-sufficient and improve their living conditions on their own?
Fortunately, we're not there yet. Knowledge has indeed accumulated on the mechanisms of development, which points to the extraordinary variability of these mechanisms in space and time, of the constraints to which they are subject, and of the policies to be implemented. The aim of this lecture is to assess this knowledge by reviewing the major debates in development economics in the light of the empirical evidence available today.
My opening lecture is divided into three parts. The first traces the way in which this knowledge has progressed, and sometimes regressed, over the course of time, in favour or against the global economic situation. The second will focus on the role of globalization, the international development community and developed countries in particular, in the development of the poorest countries. The final section will illustrate a number of the points made above by examining the challenges and constraints currently weighing on the development of sub-Saharan Africa, a region which is likely to become an increasing concentration of global poverty in the coming decades, and how we can hope to meet them.
