Why developing nations are poor

The perception that poor nations are lazy beggars is misleading. FILE PHOTO

A common assumption in economically rich countries is that developing countries are poor because their people do not work hard.

Undoubtedly, most poor countries are in the tropics and are blessed with favourable climatic conditions, oftentimes to the envy of several Western countries, whose citizens often flee from the unbearable cold winter to tour and enjoy the tropical climate.

However, one of their argument in this regard is that since the tropical environment and soil produce an abundance of organic and healthy fruits and the temperature is agreeable most of the year, it favours easy living, promoting a lack of work ethics.

They claim that since the people in the tropics are already blessed and therefore don’t need to work very hard to survive, they as a result become less industrious, leading to poverty. Rather than working hard, they argue, the ‘natives’ lie beneath the coconut trees and wait for the fruits to fall subsidising this by being beggars.

Nothing could be further from the truth. On the contrary, people in the tropics work much harder than their counterparts in rich countries. In today’s world, a higher proportion of the working-age population is found in poor countries.

According to World Bank data, in 2019 the labour force participation rate was 83 percent in Tanzania, 77 percent in Vietnam and 67 percent in Jamaica, compared to 60 percent in Germany, 61 percent in the US and 63 percent in South Korea, the supposed nations of workaholics.

In poor countries, a huge proportion of children work instead of going to school. Unicef reported that on average 29 percent of children aged between five and seven were working. This included nearly half of the children in Ethiopia and an average of 40 percent in Burkina Faso, Chad, Cameroon and Sierra Leon, Mexico and Costa Rica, on the other hand, registered the longest average weekly working hours of the OECD countries at 42.9 and 42.6 hours respectively. This is higher compared with the average working week in the US and the UK of 34.4 and 32.3 hours respectively.

In rich countries, on the other hand, the vast majority (90 percent of youths between 18 and 20 are pursuing tertiary education. This means that in the US, South Korea and Finland, for example, most people are not working until they are well into their early adulthood, many of them learning things that may not directly raise their economic productivity.

But it does not only have to do with the youth. Compared to rich countries, a lower proportion of people in poor counties survive into post-retirement age (60 to 70, depending on the country). But insofar as they are still alive, they tend to work till the sunset of their years, many of them working as self-employed farmers, shopkeepers, unpaid household workers and caretakers, until they are physically battered.

If people in poor countries are working much harder than their counterparts in rich countries, as evidence shows, then their poverty cannot be explained by a lack of diligence on their part.

That they work hard and for longer hours yet register relatively low productivity can only be explained by various forces at play, the prominent of which is the lack of some benefits that directly have an impact on productivity.

Those living in rich countries such as the UK benefit from centuries of history and economic development of which they have no claim and of which they cannot take any credit.

It is this history that has produced effective public institutions, democracy, high-quality education, quality healthcare and comparatively high-paying jobs, among others. As a result, a person born in a rich country has a far greater chance of having a better standard of living than if that same person had been born in a developing country.

Given this truth, the concept of natural economic justice — that people are rich or poor purely as a result of their talent and effort — is both dangerous and demonstrably false. It is indeed misleading and an advertisement of ignorance to opine that people living in poverty are in that state since they are too lazy to earn a decent wage.

Rather, the culprit is the unproductivity of the national economies: for example, lack of mechanisation in agriculture leads many farmers in developing counties to spend many hours performing back-breaking work just to produce enough food to feed themselves and their families, let alone produce a surplus to sell.

In that regard, poor people in poor countries are poor largely because of historical, political and technological forces that are beyond their control, rather than because of their shortcomings, least of all their willingness to work hard.

It is therefore Solomonic to single out the fundamental misunderstanding of the cause of poverty in poor countries as represented by the false imagery — the imagery that has been unfairly and ill-intentionally used by global elites, both from rich countries and the poor ones themselves to blame the poor individuals in poor countries for their poverty.

Moreover, robustly seeking answers to questions of historical injustices and restitution, international power asymmetry and national economic and political reforms is a must. But still, it requires genuine and visionary global and national leadership to break the chain of poverty.