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Idk, this one doesn't seem super difficult to diagnose. The political system has been captured by a special interest with consolidated control.
I have no idea if Rwanda and Malawi have difference there, but globally one can see clearly see the impact of culture. Just look at how well Japan did despite losing WW2 and having little natural resources, or how badly Russia has done despite its huge landmass and resources, because the political culture always seems to lead to really bad autocratic governance.
In my country (Finland) areas where Swedish speaking people are the majority do consistently better than neighbouring areas with Finnish speaking majority - lower unemployment, less health and social issues and so on. Some of that may be due to historical accumulation of wealth, but I'm convinced that mostly it's because of differences in cultural values and attitudes. Some studies indicate that the Swedish speakers tend to have better social life, which improves life outcomes in many ways.
Are you implying that a dictator would lead to Malawi becoming wealthy? Seems like a disturbing argument. If that’s not what you are implying then what are you implying?
To lead a country to prosperity is as simple as letting a nation vote and counting their votes and then giving power to the guy they voted for?
- Malawi: tobacco (55%), dried legumes (8.8%), sugar (6.7%), tea (5.7%), cotton (2%), peanuts, coffee, soy (2015 est.)
- Rwanda: Gold, tin ores, coffee, malt extract, rare earth ores
I can easily see why one has a higher GDP than the other. Very little mistery to me.
They’re both good people with pride in their work, but they are from poverty and have little in the way of skills except for manual labour jobs.
They came to South Africa, like so many from nearby countries, as our significantly more developed economy offers far better earning opportunity.
Not relevant to your comment, but want to also mention this creates xenophobic tension with the section of the local population which is in poverty as they feel their jobs are stolen. While there are certainly cases where people illegally employ immigrants to pay them less than locals, in cases where pay is at least equal, Zimbabweans and Malawians tend to have reputation of being more honest and hard working than the indigenous population.
We have Nigerians come here too and by contrast they tend to be super scetchy.
[0] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/DT.ODA.ODAT.GN.ZS?locat...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/rwanda-exercises-comman...
For the loan cases, the terms are often unaffordable, effectively handing effective control of the entire country to the entity who has the other end of the loan - it is the modern empire-by-debt.
A lot of foreign aid is direct things like food, medicine, doctors, AIDS prevention programmes, vaccines for specific things, maternal care, containment of an Ebola epidemic, etc.
Do you really think that e.g. Kenya is voting alongside EU members because the EU paid for a part of a highway between two cities in Kenya?
Then yes, there are loans and grants for infrastructure things.
> For the loan cases, the terms are often unaffordable, effectively handing effective control of the entire country to the entity who has the other end of the loan - it is the modern empire-by-debt.
That's not true. The rates are very public, and while sometimes they are on the higher end, unaffordable is a stretch, and that's how loan rates work. It is inherently risky to give loans to a developing country with high corruption rates. That's why there are also lots of direct grants or direct physical aid with stuff instead of money.
The IMF also sometimes gives loans with strict requirements on market reforms, which can be controversial. Notably in the former Soviet/Warsaw pact bloc, economic shock therapy under instruction of the IMF had some devastating short term consequences, and in some countries led to mass dubious privtisations. In most though, it paid off and led to rapid and sustained economic and social growth.
For both, around half of GDP is in the services sector. It doesn't matter that much what raw resources they export when it's a smaller portion of GDP (23% in Rwanda, 15% in Malawi). Also, almost all of those raw resources that Rwanda exports are stolen from the DRC by Rwanda-backed militias.
Foreign aid, and Rwanda's ability to position itself geopolitically as a trusted stable partner (which enables more aid and for it to get away with theft and murder) have more impact than maize vs gold.
And in the end, there are plenty of countries that have successfully developed and become less or not poor without having anything of serious value to export. From Bangladesh to the Balkans (I mean post-decolonisation Balkans, not post-Iron Curtain - it was mostly an area with subsistence farming as the main employment, disease, low rates of literacy and very low for higher education, frequent conflict and ethnic/religious tensions, few natural resources other than grain and some very limited amounts coal/minerals). If anything, it usually is the opposite, cf. the resource curse.
I would still guess corruption is a major reason. Sometimes the way it’s measured and how it’s reported is not accurate. People internalize corrupt practices as normal and stop viewing it as corruption. A bribe is a gift, a nepotistic appointment is “taking care of one’s family”.
It also doesn’t always make sense to compare only corruption with other countries. Some may be more corrupt but they have enough positive factors that they develop better despite the corruption.
It's more dependent on the press reporting corruption than of any other factor, for the extent that it measures anything real it focuses exclusively on small scale corruption, and it incredibly biased by cultural factors.
It's a mistake to use it to compare one country with another, and it's a mistake to use it to spot trends in a single place. AFAIK, it's a mistake to use it.
But yeah, what you’re saying is also done. Usually something like an anti-corruption ministry is created. Their job is to find and prosecute corruption. Guess what the most “lucrative “ and cushiest jobs are now - that’s right, the anti corruption ministry itself. Anyone doing business now has to bribe them too in addition to whoever they bribed before. And corruption goes “down” officially, and it looks good on international external metrics.
A lot of Rwanda's success is overstated as well as I've pointed out before [1].
A better model from an LDC perspective would probably be Uganda.
[0] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/DT.ODA.ODAT.GN.ZS?locat...
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43375524
This sounds like an extremely bimodal distribution -- a 40% increase in the cut-off line only captures 5% more of the population, so only a small number of people are in this "poor but survivable" zone, with most well under and some well over, I assume. Does this map to the usual rural/urban divide?
I used to make the same error. Thing is in the natural sciences this looks like circular reasoning, but in the humanities quite commonly things just hang in thin air. Case in point, the banker looks at the poor farmer and denies credit because the guy doesn't have capital, and the farmer doesn't have capital because he can't get credit. Thing is, both sides understand that.
https://www.heifer.org/our-work/where-we-work/malawi
Currently being matched 5 to 1.
> 'The unit of analysis for "why is X poor" may be the political coalition, not the country.'
So maybe the real question here is not about the absolute poverty, but the derivative: "Why hasn't Malawi seen meaningful growth for 30 years?" — And the answer could be surprisingly related to first-world countries like Finland that also have experienced decades of stunted growth.
Like Malawi, Finland has functional and stable multiparty politics. Like Malawi, Finland's politicians have spent decades locally optimizing for minor benefits towards their preferred flavor of the median voter (right wing cuts taxes a bit, left wing improves benefits a bit, nobody offers anything transformative).
Too much stability at the wrong time might be a slow curse.
Based on recent 2026 data, the average IQ in Malawi is frequently estimated to be between approximately 59.7 and 64.58.
There’s your answer.
That's the product they have most comparative advantage in producing. You're literally suggesting they should cut their income down, and try to get better at something else.
But as you say, at least in the interim, that means reducing income, which is a really hard thing to suggest.
Maybe the population doesn't feel like it needs to be productive, if they're continuing to receive such generous largesses. Isn't that the goal of UBI for developed nations? People should be able to pursue their passions and not have to worry about the necessities of life?
There have been two gigantic continent-wide wars over the Congo, for fuck's sake.
There isn't much in Africa especially in the part of Malawi. They are not even coastal (they are landlocked) which makes their situation even worse.
Starting from a lower base as well as weak institutions, weak capital markets, and political instability during the transition to democracy lead Malawi to underperform.
Additionally, Rwanda received massive amounts of foreign aid to a degree that Malawi and other African nations never saw [1]
Unsurprising that this is an OpenPhilanthropy blog.
[0] - https://countryeconomy.com/hdi?year=1990
[1] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/DT.ODA.ODAT.GN.ZS?locat...
Yes, being exploited will leave you in a bad state, but it's also important to learn why other similarly colonized countries have done a lot better over the past 30 years - what are the conditions and policies that improve things
It's not. The current vogue in the American social sciences is projecting America's Black-White / colonist-colonised dualism onto the world regardless of the facts on the ground.