Business
Supplying a poor country with cheap foreign goods solves an immediate need. But it also creates dependence and leaves no room for local producers to grow. Cheap imported medicine, for example, kept local drug makers from developing.
Development can advance even where institutions are weak, if people and institutions adapt quickly as conditions change. Governance only needs to be good enough, not consistently good. Methods that work in rich countries often fail where conditions differ.
In many developing countries, local manufacturing is dominated by immigrant or diaspora business communities rather than native entrepreneurs. Homegrown industrial success stories are rare, so a single local firm can account for nearly all of a country's exports in its sector.
Manufacturing-led growth is the only path proven to raise living standards across entire societies for generations. One country after another followed it, each in its turn. It may look old-fashioned, but nothing else has a comparable record.
As a manufacturing economy grows richer, its labor costs climb. Cost-conscious producers then move to cheaper places with many young workers and good access to big markets. Factory work migrates like a baton handed from one developing region to the next.
People who only just learned how to build factories in their own country carry that hands-on know-how to the next place. They set up machinery and hire local workers. Each new factory makes industrialization there more real.
Outsiders who treat a poor region as a market and a production base invest differently from those who treat it as a problem to relieve. Decades of aid programs aimed at poverty left extreme poverty in place. Investors who expect profit build lasting productive capacity instead.
In messy, unpredictable business settings, the firms that win are the ones willing to put up with setbacks and disorder rather than wait for stable rules. Investors who came from recently chaotic economies bear these conditions more readily than those used to orderly ones.
Corruption, accidents and worker abuse tend to come with early industrialization, as they did in the first industrial nations. Businessmen who pay bribes to get things done are better seen as amoral than immoral. Such ugliness does not by itself mean the transformation is failing.