Letter to a World That Punished Late Developers

You used to believe in progress.

Not the kind repackaged through the circular logic of GDP growth charts or the Silicon Valley delusion that an app can solve structural poverty. The kind you could feel. Roads built not just to connect cities but to connect lives. Classrooms filled. Factories buzzing. Transformation as something more than a footnote in a development report.

You told yourself the world was converging. That the poor nations would catch up with the rich, because that’s how history moves. But decades passed, and most never did.

Why? Because what you forgot — what we all forgot — is that growth isn’t inevitable. It’s

constructed. And only a few knew how to build it.

Take South Korea. In the 1960s, it was poorer than Ghana. By the 1990s, it was exporting steel, ships, semiconductors. That wasn’t luck. It wasn’t just capitalism “doing its thing.” It was industrial policy: fierce, messy, state-led planning. The government picked sectors, disciplined firms with export targets, and flooded education with investment until the children of rice farmers could engineer a microchip.

But that’s only half the story.

South Korea didn’t rise solely because of a developmental state — it rose because its people fought to make that state accountable. In 1980, protestors in Gwangju were massacred for demanding democracy. In 1987, nationwide labour strikes and student-led protests forced the military regime to yield. Wages rose. Working conditions improved. And political accountability began to replace authoritarian control.

This wave of democratisation was not a detour from development — it was part of the engine. Labour movements helped redistribute the gains of industrialisation, strengthening domestic demand and making growth more inclusive. Democracy, once suppressed, became a stabiliser. It legitimised reform. It made long-term planning possible without repression.

Taiwan followed a similarly complex path. The state was deeply involved in guiding industrialisation, especially in electronics, but its success also rested on land reform, widespread education, and a social compact that prioritised stability and mobility. In Singapore, growth came through a highly centralised model that attracted multinational investment and maintained tight control over labour and politics. While less democratic, it relied on an implicit social contract: rising prosperity in exchange for political acquiescence. In each case, growth wasn’t accidental. Institutions didn’t just emerge — they were designed, contested, and enforced.

Yet their stories have been sanitised. “Be business-friendly.” “Invest in education.” The deeper truths — the strategic statecraft, Cold War geopolitical cushioning, the suppression of dissent — get buried beneath praise for free markets and macroeconomic prudence.

Meanwhile, countries like the Philippines followed the global rulebook. Liberalise early. Don’t pick winners. Avoid state intervention. And they stayed stuck. No industrial strategy meant they exported raw materials instead of manufactured goods. No institutional reform meant corruption hollowed out policy. Education didn’t match economic needs, and graduates found no jobs.

Even when a country got it right — like Vietnam — it often did so by quietly breaking the rules. Trade liberalisation wasn’t the goal, but the means. Labour shifted into manufacturing. Productivity rose. Wages grew from the bottom. But even Vietnam’s success was conditional. Regions with better infrastructure and governance benefited more, deepening internal divides.

Hanoi’s quiet urgency: where alleyways hum with the informal economy and the legacy of Vietnam’s industrial transformation still unfolds, brick by brick. (2024)

So why hasn’t convergence spread?

Because global trade rules no longer permit most developing countries to do what East Asia once did. Tariffs and subsidies aren’t banned outright — in fact, powerful nations still use them strategically. The United States imposed sweeping tariffs under Trump, and Biden’s administration subsidises domestic manufacturing under the banner of national security or green transition. But when countries in the Global South try the same, they’re often blocked. WTO rules, IMF conditions, and free trade agreements restrict the very tools that once enabled miracles. The policy space that built South Korea is now gated — not by economics, but by geopolitics.

Because low-income countries are told to open up before they’re ready, to compete without the tools to compete, and to hope that investors will do the rest.

Because premature deindustrialisation — where nations skip manufacturing and move into low-value services — has robbed many of the one path that historically enabled catch-up growth.

And because institutions — real ones, functioning ones — take decades to build. Some places were never allowed the time.

Still, the myths persist. That growth is always good. That free markets always deliver. That democracy always works, even when it’s hollow or captured. We forget the labour movements that forced South Korea’s democracy into being. We forget that political accountability made economic reform stick.

The 1997 Asian Financial Crisis nearly erased everything. Currencies collapsed. Debt ballooned. But South Korea restructured its banks, reformed corporate governance, and recovered quickly. Indonesia didn’t. Its institutions weren’t resilient enough to weather the storm.

So here’s the hard truth: convergence is rare not because it’s impossible, but because it’s not just about economics. It’s about power, history, and who gets to shape the rules — and who is trapped by them.

And yet there is still room to grow. Not through mimicry, but through adaptation. Countries like Rwanda are experimenting with digital infrastructure and green technology. But they need capital, support, and global reform. They need a system that gives them space to build.

Progress won’t come from waiting. It never has.

So here’s your letter, world: grow again. Not through the myths you once sold yourself, but through the lessons you tried to forget. Build your own miracle. Not for convergence’s sake — but for dignity’s.