I spend a lot of time in Ethiopia for my company. In many parts of Addis Ababa, the entire skyline is under construction - you can't look up anywhere without seeing a new building in progress. The sound of hammers is ubiquitous. You can tell the place is booming.
Most of the large construction projects are run by Chinese companies, especially the Chinese State Construction Corp. New airport terminal, ministries, hotels, convention center, light rail, and so on. This has caused some discussion around Chinese taking construction jobs etc. You'll see these state-funded Chinese construction projects in pretty much every African country.
Although Addis is booming, the population still primarily lives in the countryside, and their quality of life is a lot lower. It's misleading to look at average income across the entire population because the city's economy is so far ahead of the rest of the country. This has probably contributed to some of the unrest.
This reminds me of the DW documentary I watched on their (Chinese) "aid" work in Africa. The Chinese gov lends money to they country and makes them use Chinese companies to do all the work and thus effectively brings much of the money back while dropping the legal obligation on the citizens of that nation.
Many Western aid projects are also thinly disguised subsidies for well-connected companies back home. The main difference with China is sheer scale and the fact that they tend to import their own labor as well.
There was an interesting article about other such deals with the Chinese. The Chinese would make a deal with an African nation and dump products on the market that they couldn't sell in nations who had an actual choice or quality standards that were enforced. The market would be flooded by cheap garbage tools, electronics, and etc. Quality products would disappear quickly as they were many times more expensive.... and then everyone realizes everything is garbage.
Interesting enough the construction sites contain none of these tools (the Chinese workers don't use them), and the locals now can't afford to bring them on a special order because they're either locked out of the market or many more times expensive than before due to the trade deal. Crappy state run industries just keep on trucking at the expense of the locals in Africa.
>The Chinese would make a deal with an African nation and dump products on the market that they couldn't sell in nations who had an actual choice or quality standards that were enforced. The market would be flooded by cheap garbage tools, electronics, and etc. Quality products would disappear quickly as they were many times more expensive.... and then everyone realizes everything is garbage.
You've described free trade in a nutshell. More industrialized nations love these kinds of trade policies.
You're being down-voted, but this is very similar to the US's policy on agricultural goods -- they provide "aid" (read: dump cheap staple goods like corn and wheat) into markets, which forces the domestic industries to grow produce that doesn't grow well in the US and export it at favorable rates.
These countries are then dependent upon the US for staple crops. And when international prices for staples rise relative to exports, then their citizens are the first in line to starve, as the aid is conveniently just enough to eliminate domestic industries but not enough to feed everyone. See: Mexican Tortilla Riots & Arab Spring.
I think you're attributing malice when maybe there is just inconsistent and/or competing policies written by multiple competing/overlapping bureaucracies. See this other [1] DW documentary I watched on EU ag. policies (which I'd bet are very similar to US). Jist of it is they are heavily subsidizing (with price floors) domestic (German) production while trying to spur production (with more subsidization) in the donee country that are unable to compete.
Your point doesn't diminish his statement though - This has been the de facto method of economoic imperialism for the past 3 decades or so, and all of a sudden it's a problem because China is doing so?
I don't care to get into a prolonged discussion of this as we are likely not gonna change each other's mind and I have to watch last night's episode of Westworld. Your use of "economic imperialism" has an inherently negative connotation which leads me to believe you also view these policies as inherently malice (i.e. nefarious intent). My point was that I believe the failings of our aid/development policies is more easily attributed to competing/overlapping bureaucracies than any pols malice intent. JFK establish USAID to help feed the hungry and it has a done a pretty good job (failings and all). I never stated that US policies weren't problematic but I'd put the values of our county over China's all day.
> I'd put the values of our county over China's all day
You say that as if your country's values are static. Any possible reading of history could not honestly conclude that. I'm not singling out your country by the way. But by way of a single example, look at your (and my) country's treatment of refugees and immigrants. No one is calling to "bring me your huddled masses". My country's (Australia) refugee policy definitely has an explicitly malicious intent - the use of indefinite detention against non-criminals in order to deter others.
Values change. Also, values are not a monolith. They are a spectrum. In some areas, the value gaps are definitely closing.
Canada and the US have very healthy activity in cross border free trade, but I'm unable to tell which of those two countries is the aggressor and which the victim.
And yet, Canada had to legislate a domestic automobile industry into existence (By forcing US auto manufacturers to open plants in Canada if they wanted to sell there), instead of just letting the big three import their cars. Without it, eastern Canada would lose tens of thousands of well-paid jobs.
Oh, and as soon as Canada had a competitive product in the aerospace industry (from Bombardier), the United States government slapped the company with a 200% import tariff. And here I thought that free trade benefits all parties...
If Ethopia by some miracle became a leading auto manufacturer, I assure you, the free trade rhetoric would find some way to protect GM, Chrystler-Fiat, and Ford from it. The United States is not interested in being a resource economy, with value-added industry happening somewhere else.
While I'm sympathetic generally I'm not a big fan of classifying all such trade as the same. There are deals that are clearly better than others, and some that are far far worse.
What did you expect? Borrowing a foreign currency means you can only use it to buy foreign products from a macroscopic perspective. Exchanging currency just moves it around because someone else still has the chinese currency and will use it to buy chinese products.
The bigger question is if they will have an export surplus to china which is neccessary to repay the loans. This is how china paid back it's loans.
This makes me think of the stories from a few years ago, about how Ethiopia was engaging in extensive telecommunications surveillance and control.
It makes me wonder about corresponding relationships between the parent's description and this, if any. (Not that I haven't already been wondering; it reminds me of this.)
There was an interesting Danish documentary on foreign investments in Ethiopia titled "Dead donkeys fear no hyena's" [1]. It came down that economic investments (including from the World Bank) are used to drive indigenous people from their lands, that land is sold (outside of the public eye) to anonymous foreign agricultural corporations to start industrialized agriculture. However, those corporations will just export everything abroad, leaving the local people with little return, and, most importantly, without food. Promises of compensation, relocation and education are, of course, neglected, and people who dare to protest are met with arms.
> "Dead Donkeys Fear No Hyenas was triggered by a seemingly trivial scene at the airport in Addis Ababa, six years back. Waiting for my flight late at night, I happened to see some tired workers at the tarmac who were loading food products on an airplane destined for Europe. At the same time, another team was busy unloading sacks with food aid from a second plane. It took some time to realize the real meaning of it – that this famine struck country, where millions are dependent on food aid, is actually exporting food to us."
>food products on an airplane destined for Europe. At the same time, another team was busy unloading sacks with food aid from a second plane.
while everyone should acknowledge the degree of poverty that is still rampant in countries like Ethiopia, that image is not particularly well suited to make a point.
It can be true that at the same time that Ethiopian farmers sell produce to Europe, while people from somewhere else try to alleviate poverty in the country.
It would not make sense for farmers in Ethiopia to stop trading food with the world at large just because people in the country are hungry. In fact, depending on whatever economic transaction is going on, the food coming in might be significantly cheaper than the food going out. Trade and reducing poverty or hunger are not at odds.
The goal should be to generate better incomes and social services for poor Ethiopians, not stopping businesses from trading with Ethiopia globally.
> It can be true that at the same time that Ethiopian farmers sell produce to Europe.
It is mentioned multiple times in the movie, and in these comments, that it is not Ethiopian farmers those who trade with anyone. Foreign corporations on incognito or behind domestic providers are those who suck money out of a poor country presumably without or with astonishingly weak trade legislature. More strikingly, doing so at the cost of famine of the blatantly low paid workers while violating not only ethics but also human rights of those exploited humans.
If those corporations were so savvy investors they would make profit at home under well ordered trade system.
Farming high value cash crops for export and importing rice should be perfectly fine, agreed. But the problem of foreign investors taking all the gains abroad, forever, after striking some very one-sided deals through power imbalance and/or knowledge imbalance and/or one-time paying off some representatives remains untouched by that argument.
Actually I believe that for a country rich in cash crop potential, some form of communism might actually be not so bad (e.g. free market with a strong legal bias favoring the formation of co-ops in agriculture). Certainly not worse than an economy dominated by a few plantation lords (doubly so if those are foreign entities), if that's the only alternative. I wouldn't suggest anything for Ethiopia though, wouldn't suggest anything, just too dang little knowledge about the place (and my personal threshold for feeling comfortable with playing armchair president is embarrassingly low).
These are all solvable problems without requiring the expropriation of foreign investors. A sensible legislature which allows workers to unionize and a tax collecting agency which actually does its job - in short working institutions - can reduce most of these problems.
But what happens most of the time in these unstable African governments is that they gravitate from one extreme to another: Either they enforce zero workers rights and exert very little control over foreign investors - allowing them to pay bribes to individuals rather than taxes which would benefit state run institutions. Or they nationalize every last farm and shop in the country, scaring away foreign investment and know-how and end up with lower productivity and mismanagement of local industries.
You are saying this, as if the decision to strip the population from their subsistence and working rights was made ONLY by local politicians. This is in fact a collusion between politicians and foreign investors. In this collusion, foreign investors have much more responsibility because, after all, local corrupt politicians have less opportunities than foreign capital owners, and therefore it is harder for them to make ethical decisions. Moreover, developed countries love to put all the responsibility of corruption in the hands of local politicians, as if they were really supporting in some way the non-corrupt ones, which is completely untrue as anyone from a third world country will point out.
I agree that it's a collusion between politicians and foreign investors. I wouldn't go so far as saying that one party has more responsibility than the other. But I would add a third party that also carries responsibility: The electorate - if the country in question has a democracy.
Even in a mature democracy, like in the USA, it is difficult for voters to determine who is acting in their interest due to the multiple layers of non-declared interests that exist in each political party. Now imagine what happens in a poor country. Your supposition that the electorate is responsible for this is as true as assuming that a victim of theft is responsible for the robbery.
Once a country has reached certain threshold of poverty, elections can get very sensitive to bought support. Maybe not direct, checked "money for vote" transactions, but gaining "genuine" support by being generous (genuine as in the voters don't realize that they are being manipulated).
And if toxic investors are clever, they might even support every major candidate a little: they have already reached their goal if the eventual winner believes that his secret supporter was acting as kingmaker. Might be much cheaper in total than actually forcing a result with money.
It's actually historically the normal case that governments try for the sensible middle road, then get pushed towards communism by the West. Allende, for instance, was pretty liberal - but the USA was convinced he was a communist, and torpedoed the Chilean economy.
>Actually I believe that for a country rich in cash crop potential, some form of communism might actually be not so bad
The international community / western marketplace obliterates any country that dares expropriate / nationalize the lands of the (white colonialist) landholding class.
Just look at how the West has cut off Cuba and Venezuela.
On the contrary, the image itself is uncomfortably well suited to make a point. This comment is a classic example of defending an obvious absurdity of capitalism by appealing to the overall system.
It's true that individuals are all acting rationally, and that imposing limits on exports would not be a panacea. However, at the most basic level, it is monstrous that food exports are happening in the context of local starvation. The rationality of the outcome within capitalism shouldn't blind us to the absurdity of the outcome itself.
There's really nothing absurd about this. A country like Ethiopia consists of independent actors. Someone might sell food abroad to Europe, someone in Europe might decide to send food to Ethiopia.
There's really no way to stop this other than to outlaw all exports of food while starting to centrally distribute food in Ethiopia. This is neither productive nor would it reduce the amount of starving people in Ethiopia. In fact, it would increase the amount of poverty.
There are certainly poor people who have trouble affording basic goods in California. Still the solution is not to stop all exports of goods from California to Washington and vice versa. This would just make everybody worse off.
Any country that pretend to develop and keep some independence need to prioritize a minimum of food production. That's a strategic need. Europe is a good example of that, where food production is strongly protected. I bet is the same in the States.
The point of the original post is that those "independent actors" are not "independents", not from Ethiopia.
> It's true that individuals are all acting rationally
At least one party in the food market isn't acting rationally. The situation where food is produced in Ethiopia for consumption in Europe and food is produced in Europe for consumption in Ethiopia could equivalently be solved by keeping the food in its country of origin and everyone saves on transport costs.
But maybe the Ethiopian "food" was just something like coffee beans which can't really feed a population, in which case there also isn't any problem with exporting them.
That is a simplistic argument that ignores trade. Sure Ethiopia could grow it own food: cut down the coffee trees (bush?) and plant something else. What you are missing is that those foods that would replace the coffee tree don't grow as well in Ethiopia as coffee does.
Both Ethiopia and Europe would be worse off for your plan. Ethiopia because instead of the profit from coffee they subsistence farm something that doesn't grow as well. Europe because they don't have coffee and they get even more of the crops they already grow too much of.
Now some have pointed out that the profit from Ethiopian coffee might not got to Ethiopia. That might be true (I don't know), but even if so, Ethiopia retains more money than if they quit exporting coffee and the profits.
This is all well and good as long as Ethiopia can buy more food then it could have grown in those coffee fields.
Unfortunately, it also puts it at the mercy of forex rates, collapse of their monoculture, food shortages in other parts of the world causing rising food prices, any disruptions in foreign trade... Any of those things go south, and now you have millions of starving people. Sitting on a pile of coffee beans.
Why do you think the US government pushes billions of dollars into agriculture subsidies? Wouldn't it be so much cheaper if it just imported all of its food from abroad - where farmers get paid ~$1/day, instead of $6/hour.
There's a simple reason - it's because it doesn't want food riots, caused by some factor outside of their control. Nothing brings about regime change faster then the price of bread. [1] No well-ran country wants to be dependent on food, or oil imports.
Ironically, these same agriculture subsidies are what cripples agriculture in other nations - they can't always compete with Uncle Sam's subsidies.
> it is monstrous that food exports are happening in the context of local starvation
This is only absurd if you consider the nation-state to be the fundamental unit of mutual aid.
If you consider a different division of population - the corporation, or the city-state, or the tribe, or the individual, for example - it makes perfect sense. Even before "monstrous" capitalism, you'd get plenty of situations where one tribe would actively pillage the farms of a neighboring tribe - food "exports" and local starvation.
You might argue that this is monstrous as well, and I'd even agree with you, but that's an argument against being shitty to your fellow human beings, and not specifically against capitalism. Capitalism is just yet another definition of "tribe", where the corporation that employs you is the tribe that you owe allegiance to, damn all the other tribes.
Yes, before capitalism, which is bad, things were even worse. I can critique both capitalism and what came before it. And it's not just an argument"against being shitty."
Capitalism really doesn't have anything to do with tribalism though. Workers don't have any allegiance whatsoever to their employer beyond that dictated by the imperative of not starving to death. The structural constraint under critique is the one where capital seeks to maximize profits regardless of the human cost. So, when a grower exports food for money instead of giving it to starving people for free, that's what I'm talking about.
It seems to me that the problem is that open markets (capitalism is too general for this I think) is sold like the perfect panacea that will solve all the problems, even if the evidence is against it.
The path followed for development by the developed nations have nothing to do with the path they (we?) recommend to underdeveloped nations.
>Trade and reducing poverty or hunger are not at odds.
This is a statement that is not necessarily true on its face.
When the country's currency is gradually inflated away to worthlessness [1] and economic prospects are limited for non-landowning classes of people, trade and reducing poverty can indeed be at odds. You need only look at history [2] to see the real effect imperialist export policies can have on a population.
It's striking, but trading a small amount of high-priced food for a much larger amount of low-priced food might be a good trade, provided that the imported food somehow gets to the people who need it.
To get some real insight into this we'd need to find out what goes wrong when that last step doesn't happen.
It is the same thing that allowed someone to decide to grow high priced export crops instead of feeding their neighbours. And the same thing that allows them to trade their crops for money.
The country of Ethiopia is not one collective organization but made up of individuals. The enclosure of resources for individuals allow independent trade and returns, meaning that gains are not distributed across society but held by the individual.
It is the same system everywhere.
Why are schools underfunded? Why are homeless shelters underfunded? Why are food banks underfunded?
Productivity is best held in individual hands. Taxation is the best mechanism to distribute wealth. However the taxes go through political hands and is thus corruptible.
This might go terribly wrong in the case where profits from this trade goes to foreign held companies, who pay the farmers next to nothing for their work, taking advantage of the situation where people are literally dying of starvation.
How do the foreign companies grow produce ? Do they employ local people ?
From examples of India I personally feel the real issue here is the inability of the country to clearly enforce property rights and especially for poor and tribal people. (Tribal people might be better off selling off land to richer corporation and working in those fields as an employee)
You know the corruption mindset and very bad things are on the horizon when your gouvernement can't or is unwilling to protect its territory from foreign actors :/.
I’m generally loathe to make blanket statements about organizations, because they are made up of many people with many motives...
But I’m pretty sure this is the entire purpose of the World Bank. Scam weak nations out of their resources and give them to extranational corporations.
I think they have a “do good” arm but the “extricate resources” arm has final say. If the do good arm ever, say, started returning large amounts of productive land to indigenous farmers, that program would be quietly killed.
The net effect of the do good arm is then just PR for the extricating of resources.
That's foolish. In order to start the gears of capitalism turning in a country you have to start somewhere. As the standard economic development model goes, agriculture -> industry -> services.
In Ethiopia they are starting with advanced agriculture, and the World Bank is critical in jump starting that process. Foreign companies need to participate in a local economy when there are no local alternatives.
The people don't get the food produced on their farms because they can't afford the food. They can't afford it because the Ethiopian economy is in its infancy. Sure it doesn't feel right when the food is being shipped out of the country, but that's how capitalism works.
If Ethiopia plays by the rules of the game for the next few decades then their economy will grow the problems we see in today's Ethiopia will be diminished.
Starting this process is the purpose of the World Bank.
>The people don't get the food produced on their farms because they can't afford the food. They can't afford it because the Ethiopian economy is in its infancy. Sure it doesn't feel right when the food is being shipped out of the country, but that's how capitalism works.
>If Ethiopia plays by the rules of the game for the next few decades then their economy will grow the problems we see in today's Ethiopia will be diminished.
If someone came to you with this proposition, that your region would grow in a few decades (maybe in time for your grandchildren to benefit) while you watch your neighbors starve and the profits and food from your countries land is shipped overseas for the majority of your adult life, I hope you would do the sane thing and tell that person to fuck off.
The "rules of the game" are "get yours, and get it now by whatever means capable", which is what countries with capability do and will continue to do. If their actions result in any benefit to the world outside their borders, it is incidental.
> The people don't get the food produced on their farms because they can't afford the food. They can't afford it because the Ethiopian economy is in its infancy. Sure it doesn't feel right when the food is being shipped out of the country, but that's how capitalism works.
So people starve because they cannot afford to eat the food that they farm. If that's how capitalism works then maybe capitalism needs some adjustments.
It's working out pretty well for China, which started out with essentially nothing in terms of a capital base.
Law, order and prudent fiscal/monetary policy are all it takes. If Ethiopia can guarantee these things then the international community of capitalism will reward it and its citizens will reap the rewards.
This is not news , Africa is the only continent that produces what it doesn't need but imports all that it needs. It is very unfortunate that Africans have not been able to break this colonial structure.
Unlike most of Africa, Europeans never colonized Ethiopia. The closest they got is a 5-year occupation during World War II which is too short to count as true colonization.
The Italian occupation was definitely an attempt at colonization. We can argue if it was considered temporarily successful or not, but I’m not sure what true colonization is like I’m not sure what a true Scotsman is.
Yeah they definitely tried to colonize Ethiopia then. We're agreeing. They simply failed to stay long enough to convert an occupation into a colonization.
This is still true. They do receive some foreign aid money from Western countries, including the US, but that's different from being a colony even if it is a tie to the global economic and geopolitical system.
An assertion about "Africa" is like an assertion about "Asia", which includes everything from Russia to Thailand to India to China to Turkmenistan to Iran to Japan to North Korea. There are few assertions one can make about all of Africa, which covers Egypt to Morocco to South Africa to Kenya to Liberia to Madagascar, and so much in between.
> the only continent that produces what it doesn't need but imports all that it needs
That's normal trade behavior. You produce things in which you have comparative advantage, then trade them for things that others produce more efficiently.
France produces far more wine than it needs and Japan produces far more cars than it needs because both are great at making those things. Then they trade; resources are used most efficiently, because both are more efficient at producing their specialty; and consumers get the best products in the world. You get more for less. Otherwise you'd have lots of Japanese wine and French cars.
But when what you export is mere commodities without adding extra value you are most likely to get little in returns . Africa is hollow inside , no manufacturing going on within sub Sahara. The only industry in this region is extractive ones . And their so-called products are not even priced locally , they have little or no control at setting prices.
They can start with the corrupt scum that enable this behavior, for example local warlords/political kingmakers that ingratiate themselves to the foreign markets and blatantly enrich themselves at the expense of their neighbors. They're not all "victims."
This is good, but there are some potential problems.
1. Ethiopia's GDP per capita is ~$700 USD, so this growth is from a very low base.
2. Total fertility rate is 4.28. Compare this to China at 1.57 and USA at 1.84. This means that some of the growth just goes to supporting a larger population.
3. I have read elsewhere that you need government connections and a lot of money to do business in Ethiopia. So the benefits of this growth might not be as broad as they otherwise could be.
In that year, GDP growth was 7.5%, but per-capita GDP growth was 4.9%. I could have some gaps in my knowledge of the meanings in these figures, but I think the difference roughly equates to what you speculate - that population growth eats some of the economic growth when viewed from the perspective of the individual.
Also important to note, I think that these are nominal, not real figures. So right now, I think we would reasonably expect sub-5% real per-capita growth. Even correcting for that I'm sure it's an astounding pace of improvement. It's hard to wrap your head around multi-year improvements in quality of life of that scale.
But there's a depressing side, that maybe some nations are actually contracting in per-capita real GDP.
1. True, but not radically different from the rest of Africa. Further the PPP figure is about $1700, which is a bit more indicative of purchasing power / standard of wealth. 10% growth in Ethiopia may not be as impressive as say China growing 10%, but it's still 10% growth that few African countries can match consistently. Having $170 extra can mean better nutrition, a cellphone, a bicycle, communal investments etc. Moreover, it shows good prospects and stability, the type of conditions necessary to attract FDI and cheap borrowing rates going into the future.
2. Not really. Fertility rates tend to have a strong negative relationship with wealth. The best thing you can do to reduce fertility rates is improve economic prospects in a country. Populations aren't growing because fertility rates, they're going down. Populations are growing because general healthcare and life expectancy has improved radically in the past 50 years or so.
3. That's the case all over Africa, but rising tides lift all boats at least to some extent. I mean, take a look at South Korea. It had a dictatorship until the 80s and was extremely corrupt, we still see high-profile cases of corruption (right to the 43rd prime minister resigning on corruption charges in 2016). Corruption is obviously not desirable and indeed distributions benefits unevenly, but there are many countries (like Korea) which have a history of high-corruption and rapidly growing socioeconomic conditions of ordinary citizens.
1. I agree. I was pointing that out more to show that even with impressive growth rates they still have a long way to go.
2. I agree that TFR declines with wealth, but it is still true that if your population is growing your economy has to grow faster to compensate for it. I am not sure how quickly TFR falls as the economy grows. If it lags significantly this will still have an effect.
3. This one is trickier. There are large differences between the poor African countries and the previously poor Asian countries. The authoritarian governments in South Korea, Taiwan, and China actually helped these countries get out of poverty because they could enforce policies that otherwise would not be popular, like redistribution of land to peasants and protecting infant industries from foreign competition while they developed. Japan was a little different (actually so was China) but had similar policies. These policies are not being implemented in Africa.
The corruption in Asia and the corruption in Africa are also of a different kind. South Korea allowed some corruption as long as the managers of the companies involved where able to produce globally competitive products. In Africa the corruption has largely enriched a small number of well connected people while doing nothing to help the local population. I am not sure how corrupt Ethiopia is.
Either way, I wasn't talking about corruption as much as the difficulty of doing business in Ethiopia, which seems to be difficult if you do not already have money and connections, which suggests that the benefits of economic growth will be more concentrated than they otherwise could be and they have in the Asian countries that successfully emerged from poverty.
Africa has had 50 years to adopt better policies, but instead we see frequent civil wars, endemic corruption, and poor governance. These problems aren't insurmountable, but they are large.
>>" The authoritarian governments in South Korea, Taiwan, and China actually helped these countries get out of poverty because they could enforce policies that otherwise would not be popular, like redistribution of land to peasants and protecting infant industries from foreign competition while they developed."
Those are not popular policies? do you mean popular for the IMF and the World bank or what?
Well the land redistribution isn't popular with landowners, who tend to have a lot of power. The industry protection isn't popular with the IMF and World Bank and is often abused or helps corrupt people in government funnel money to their family and friends.
You're probably right that sometimes there is popular support for these policies but it's hard to get them in place.
Schools don't help if there are no jobs after graduation, which is the case in much of Africa. The problems these countries face is staggering, not insurmountable, but really hard.
Fertility rate will come down as incomes rise and child mortality falls. Until recently Ethiopia had one of the world's highest child mortality rates so I would expect some significant lag.
That's true. China had some advantages at the local level though, in that many of the reforms were actually first done by the peasants and tacitly allowed by the government until Deng Xiaoping allowed economic reform to happen.
I think Ethiopia has some really tough challenges ahead of it, but it will obviously be good for them and good for Africa if they can make it work.
It's interesting to me how the problem of "who owns what parts of this river?" is playing out in so many parts of the world. Off the top of my head we have the Nile with Egypt and Ethiopia, the Yangtze (edit: this should be Mekong) with China and much of southeast Asia, the Murray river in southwest Australia (bickering states rather than countries, but still) . . . and this is just what I've read in the Economist this year.
Is this really that new? Has damming technology only recently made these issues relevant?
This same story played out a hundred years ago in the USA, see the Colorado River Compact.
I would initially guess it's a problem now for the rivers you mention because only now do these places have the capital & use for a dam.
And, really, fights over water never end. It's a difficult good- vital to life, inexpensive to divert, and yet both limited & temporal in supply, & difficult to relocate. Additionally, the source is frequently within another state or country. No one has been terribly successful yet in implementing water markets, and no one has conjured a perfect way to apportion water rights- with right of first use & riparian rights both having obvious flaws.
Crazy things happen with water. For example, where I live I am not allowed to capture the water that falls on my own property. It's owned by someone else, and I can be prosecuted for capturing it (with a loophole for garden rainbarrels)
Portugal and Spain too. Conditions change (e.g. there was a drought in these two countries), needs change, etc; there's probably always a conflict somewhere.
Depends what you count as China; the Yangtze, Yellow River and Mekong all originate in Tibet. They're probably the primary reason why China is so absolutely adamant that Tibet is and has always been part of China; losing that water would represent an existential threat.
Ethiopia seemingly has an incredibly good relationship with China. The lion's share of FDI in Ethiopia is from China, and much of it goes towards large infrastructure projects. Flying through the airport in Addis recently I was surprised to see multiple Chinese restaurants, a special lounge for Chinese travelers, and signs everywhere in Chinese.
It's great to see economic cooperation working out so well on so many levels!
This sounds more like a case of rental values of locations increasing, as the price of prime urban land is bid up, requiring laborers be paid more to achieve the same standard of living, and inflating costs across the board.
Same issue that all booming cities face, whether it is New York, San Francisco, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, or anywhere else.
Many countries grew rich off of US exploitation. Japan and then China wouldn't be the power houses they are today if it wasn't for the US needing a place to offload cheap and dirty manufacturing. True, many more countries were just exploited without any gain, but there are factors that can tilt the balance in your favor.
The fact that they're a strong economy with a strong military and have a government wary of imperialism bodes well, as long as the can keep the number of revolutions and civil conflicts low. Stability is the key.
Let's have a nuanced conversation about this. The article suggests that Ethiopia may be trying to position itself as a destination for manufacturing. In today's global economy, regardless of value judgments about its merits, less developed countries have an opportunity because they can offer much lower labor costs than highly-developed states. However, structural changes that result from large-scale gainful employment cause costs to rise over time, as a middle class emerges, people place themselves into global context, and begin to ponder whether they can realistically achieve something better. This is happening in China today.
The continent of Africa remains the last frontier in outsourcing manufacturing, but right now it's not competitive: transport costs are high, there are issues with utilities, capricious governments, and no established concentration of expertise. The Chinese involvement is working hard on improving these for other reasons, but ironically it may enable Ethiopia to begin to take on roles that China has now in the global supply chain. It may also be deliberate: during a gold rush, most money was made by those who enabled the prospectors, not the prospectors themselves.
More broadly, taking on debt to build the infrastructure needed to level up industrial capabilities isn't exploitation. Building better energy grids, transportation, and communication infrastructure is expensive. It's fundamentally no different than software startups taking on fundraising rounds to enable growth. As long as the leadership isn't irresponsible about it, there's nothing wrong with it and it should easily pay for itself.
The important thing for debt-for-infrastructure planning is to keep corruption manageable, so you don't wind up borrowing to build boondoggles that are for the personal enrichment of the the well-connected rather than the good of the country.
At any rate, China is no more predatory in this regard than the IMF, the World Bank, or other western financial institutions. They have a surplus of capital and need to invest it somewhere. The goal is not imperialist, but rather capitalist.
It would be better if you could attempt to support your argument with data, analysis and research.
Is Ethiopia in a lot of debt trouble? From [1], figure 1.17, doesn't seem too troubling, especially when considering its growth rate.
Your assertion that China plans to overload countries with debt also seem to be based on the heavily promoted Sri Lanka story while ignoring any other data points. The Center for Growth Development has a report, [2], Examining the Debt Implications of the Belt and Road Initiative from a Policy Perspective. They find that for the 68 countries analyzed, only 8 are at risk. Your story also contradicts the many times China has provided debt relief.
> In countries suffering from debt distress, the Chinese government has provided debt relief in an ad hoc, case-by-case manner [...] The IMF estimates that China has delivered over 80 percent of what it is expected to provide under HIPC. It was a creditor to 31 of the 36 HIPC countries, and the most recent publicly available information indicates that it provided relief in at least 28 of them, including 100 percent forgiveness for several (e.g., Burundi, Afghanistan, and Guinea). […] China has also demonstrated a willingness to provide additional credit so a borrower can avoid default. A prominent example is China's agreement in early 2017 to extend an RMB 15 billion swap line to Mongolia for three years in support of an IMF Extended Fund Facility.
I said it might not be a good thing and pointed to a an example where it wasn't. The take away was to not just take the information at hand but do you own research (like you did).
"China will cause the country to become indebted to it and when they can't make the repayments offer to helpfully take full control of it."
You honestly can't tell me you don't see that as a loaded statement...And based on your replies to other commentators, doesn't seem like you intended that either.
Note that this is probably also because of foreign travelers in transit through the airport. Ethiopian Airlines is growing fast and is a major player in travel to a lot of African countries. See for instance https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ethiopia-airlines/ethiopi...
A family member on a recent flight between Chad and Addis Abeba told me that 85% of passengers on the flight were Chinese.
It's more than just good relation, its a --quite-- assistant to Ethiopia from Chinese government to export nation build expertise with a goal of creating a prosperous area that ultimately as an investor also can benefit from the development and growth by itself.
Contractors and private companies are just tip of iceberg. A lot of hi level government cooperations , government sponsored think tank activities[1] which might play a more important role than private business activities. Chinese are coaching Ethiopia to build a nation.
It's the same journey that China itself experienced for last 30 years. The nation building expertise partially comes from tons of competing local government policy makers fighting for the prosperity of their home cities on the vast experiment field of 1.3 billion people, but in early years of struggle also from Hongkong,Taiwan entrepreneurs and even a foreign government with their management expertise when China was as poor as many Africa countries and with no expertise. During the time (in 1996) I created the first web site for CS-SIP[2], I witnessed local Chinese government officials learned from Singapore coaches like pupils.
Why Ethiopia? Because although it's a democracy but the Ethiopian political ecosystem is closer to an "Orwellian regime" that makes building nation possible. It's totally not because Chinese particularly like a regime. Actually Chinese are ideology agnostic and pragmatic. Chinese have a better understanding that this kind of "oppressive" governance creates less chaos. For example Chinese construction contractors almost always hire Chinese worker from China. The real reason is those are the only qualified teams[3] be able to get the job done. However in a democratic countries some sponsored NGO and activists will speak out the "true" that Chinese companies have job discrimination against local people. Then there are massive protests by local people Th Projects can not continue. These incidents happened many times in non-regime countries.
Why quite? Isn't nation building expertise is more valuable and worth to promote than business building expertise so larger population can benefit from? There are a couple of reasons:
1.Western journalists are almost all belief driven people with a little different mindset of HN readers with proof driven thinking. Most of them are activists in the guise Journalist who want to promote their own ideology. They mentally deny the real cause of fast growth in Ethiopia because both governments are regimes so they unintentional hide the truth.
2.Chinese government don't want to be to visible so the nation building is less likely to be interrupted. The international community won't see Chinese effort as an mutual beneficial economic activity but as an expansion to gain regional influence like Soviet Union or Iran because international community is largely brain washed by Orwell's works like 1984 which used to be valid many years ago and still valuable but not applicable everywhere any more.
[1]I have a old friend did consulting job helping policy making for Ethiopia
So after reading Factfulness by Hans Rosling and family I'm really interested in investing in African companies. Ideally it would be through index funds. I got as far as finding ABSA as my go to online broker, but couldn't find any indexes to research (just a bunch of broken links)
Would anybody have any resources or direction to point me to?
As an African, I can tell you the biggest issue for investment on the continent is governmental leadership. The incumbent governments tend to hold a large amount of unilateral legal power and generally don't wield it well when it comes to economics (exceptions to this would be a lot of legislation from Kigame in Rwanda, and Mauritius).
Assuming this was fixed, though, I would recommend looking into infrastructure and technology products and services, especially those that are homegrown. These are what most countries need the most and the potential for their growth would be tremendous given the continent's population size.
> Assuming this was fixed, though, I would recommend looking into infrastructure and technology products and services, especially those that are homegrown. These are what most countries need the most and the potential for their growth would be tremendous given the continent's population size.
infrastructure in africa is weird though, most of it goes from the resource rich lands to some port for export.
There is very little infrastructure between african nations in comparison, which hurts inter-african trade a lot, because it usually results in exporting to other countries being cheaper and using the resources to grow the trade between african nations.
Having an internal market (like the EU common market) allows for massive growth of the economies of different nations, it's a shame infrastructure for it does not exist (yet).
Absolutely. There is an African Union (AU), but it is a largely toothless organisation in practice and there is little real collaboration between nations on the continent.
Again, it comes to leadership. Rwanda, as an example, has great business legislation but being a small, landlocked country it will be reliant on good legislation from its neighbours too in order to really blossom, and sadly this is largely missing.
Totally agree that technology products/services have significant role to play in Africa, especially as we have leapfrogged lines and gone direct to mobile. I think the key point as you highlighted is is that its is homegrown - it took me a while to unlearn/adjust my approach when introducing data-focused products to in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
as an aside, how do you think governmental leadership relates to the informal nature of many of africa's economies?
i ask because one of the issues that india's legislators have is to create policies which can intelligently regulate a largely off-the-books economy. the results end up looking stupid and not being effective a lot of the time.
I don't know much about Indian government, but the problem with African governments is they tend to operate on a selfish basis, i.e. their legislation is designed around improving public employees (including top leadership) to the detriment of the population.
When the government's legislation is sometimes actively against your welfare as a citizen, I imagine you're much more likely to have off-the-books and informal business. Again, the lack of infrastructure in many places requires citizens to work around these problems and the larger sense of community in most African cultures also makes an informal economy more likely.
These are just anecdotal opinions, though, so take it with a large pinch of salt.
There's a Ryan Hoover (not the Product Hunt founder) that blogs about how to open a brokerage account as a foreigner in order to buy stocks in different countries:
https://kiva.org lets you invest in local people by providing microlending services, but you aren't going to make a return on your investment if that's your motivation.
I work with both domestic and foreign private companies in Ethiopia and the main vehicle to invest here is via equity participation (ex. private equity investments - firms such as KKR, Norfund, Catalyst)) or strategic joint ventures with multinationals. The capital markets are still quite nascent across Africa ( Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria leading the way) so index funds will be challenging. Check out Barclays Africa, Atlas Mara,Standard Bank, Eco Bank, and United Bank to see if they offer options via funds.If you are interested in investing in Ethiopia, happy to discuss further(Shameless plug: Our company provides investment data to support local companies, global investors and policy makers make informed decisions abut Ethiopia's business landscape. I conducted on the ground research and found the lack of data that is easily accessible and informative is a significant problem which hinders the rate of investmentactivity here. Today, we engage with about 450+ local companies across various sectors :)
What is their financial system like? My guess is not very good. I think most of the gains are going to go to private investors, businesses, and other countries that can afford to invest in large projects.
At least in the US you can invest in a car company or a mining company for example. In Africa the companies that do anything important are either state owned or foreign companies for the most part (as far as I know).
Financial system varies broadly country to country, but there are virtually no publicly traded African companies. If you wish to invest you need to find private companies willing to take on an investor
Sure, but outside of South Africa I believe what the OP is saying is true. In any case, better to correct him than downvote him without an explanation.
I expect you would find that the biggest companies in most of Africa are either state owned mining and oil companies or western companies operating in Africa. I don't think they have many important publicly traded companies because their financial systems aren't well developed.
There are virtually no publicly traded African companies. There are companies like glencore that have operations here, but they’re still European or Asian companies. If you’re looking to invest in African companies you have to put time in on the ground to find private companies suitable for investment.
That's just not true. A more accurate statement would be there are very few African companies listed on American stock exchanges. They are still listed in their home country's exchanges
That's a joke. Look at the Casablanca Stock Exchange, $70b. Egypt $400b. South African about $1 trillion. Daily volume is between $50 - $200 million or so. And no, not just European or Asian companies. Plenty of national infrastructure companies, telecom, banking etc.
> There are virtually no publicly traded African companies.
Wow. I'm speechless - how did you arrive at that (incorrect) conclusion? Not only are there plenty of African stock exchanges[1], a lot of publicly traded companies opt to be (dually or exclusively) listed on foreign bourses.
I have tried a lot of different coffees, and I personally think Ethiopian is just about the most pleasantly flavorful in the world, at least for my taste. The fresher the better.
Just a few years ago, Libya was the jewel of Africa and led in almost every social and economic metric. I wonder what happened there to throw them so horribly off course?
Kadafi gave up his nukes. We saw the same thing happen in Ukraine after they gave up their nukes.
Do you know what is happening in Iran these past few weeks? And I say this as an Israeli, whom Iran has already threatened to destroy. I understand their position. Moreso if you consider which two countries border Iran to the east and to the west, and what has happened in those two countries not long after the turn of the millennium.
Don't get me wrong, I realize that Europe, Israel, and the US are better off with a non-nuclear Iran. But having seen Libya and Ukraine, I completely understand the Iranian position.
Yeah I recall Mehdi Hasan's article about this some 7 years ago:
"Wouldn't it be rational for Iran – geographically encircled, politically isolated, feeling threatened – to want its own arsenal of nukes, for defensive and deterrent purposes?" Pointing out the difference between America, and its allies, going to "war with non-nuclear Iraq" and their "diplomacy with nuclear-armed North Korea", Hasan concluded: "The simple fact is there is no alternative to diplomacy, no matter how truculent or paranoid the leaders of Iran might seem to western eyes." [0]
As for the OP's question... it was a dictatorship for 40 years driven not by good governance but by oil money. You either have a dictatorship that builds very strong institutions for a post-dictator rule, or you don't. And particularly the oil-dependent states forgo building the right institutions, because an oil-rich country doesn't need them. Without institutions and civil society a dictatorship erupts into chaos after the dictator dies, particularly if it happens abruptly.
In terms of institutions and governance Libya was far from the jewel of Africa. It was never designed to last. It's more akin to someone living on creditcard debt for a few years before it all comes crashing down.
North Korea has survived until now not because they recently got nukes, but because they are holding South Korea hostage. The moment foreign troops near Pyongyang, conventional NK artillery would have leveled Seoul completely. Millions of rich-country people in a nation allied to the US would die. Also China would have been pissed.
An aside: I was listening to a Rick Steves (American celebrity traveler) presentation on the radio the other day. He was getting too preachy and just as I was about to change the channel he recounted a story about a trip to Iran. They were stuck in traffic in sweltering heat and the driver says "death to traffic". This caught Rick off guard and he inquired further.
Long story short, "death to FOO" is apparently an idiomatic phrase in Iran, especially in a political context, going back to the early 20th century. From http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=31116
The phrase became popular during the Persian Constitutional
Revolution (1905-1911), when political activists would chant
"zende ba ___" ("long live ___") in support of a policy or
leader, or "marg bar ___" in opposition. These two phrases
became entrenched within Iranian political discourse, and
during the Iranian Revolution of 1979, swarms of protestors
took to the streets chanting "marg bar Shah" to express
their dissatisfaction with Iran's monarchy. "Marg bar ___"
and "zende ba ___" have continued to live on as colloquial
phrases incorporated into political chants, and they have
been appropriated to express opposition to or support for
any number of subjects.
It's similar to how English speakers might say, "damn Iran". Such an utterance doesn't imply that one wishes all Iranians to burn in Hell for eternity.
I mention this because in American English "destroy" is a very strong literal term unless there's obvious sarcasm. Going back and parsing several infamous Iranian statements (official, or made by leaders)--"death to", "wiping Israel off the map", etc--I think it's fair to say that one could reasonably construe those statements as deliberately worded to refer to the Israeli political state. Of course, what Iran has said and what it has done (e.g. support terrorism) are quite different things. And destroying the political state vs the population is arguably a distinction without a difference as a practical matter. But in as much as Americans and Israelis believe that because of the seemingly common, blunt language that Iranians en mass wish to see the U.S. and even Israel literally destroyed, I think there's some unfair, possibly willful misinterpretation.
By that reason they were nobody's nukes. Ukraine was a successor state of the USSR, and operational control of the weapons was a technological matter, not a political matter. The weapons delivery systems (missiles and heavy bombers) were located in Ukraine, as were the development and production chains.
In other words, the actual people who built the missiles would simply swap out an electronic control component to acquire operation control of the devices. These are the same people who voted >90% for Ukrainian independence and who distrusted the other large USSR successor state, Russia.
I'm hopeful for Ethiopia that their economy being much more diverse (especially once the hydroelectric dam comes online), their economy will prove more resiliant
Yes, our newborn was our fastest growing child for a long time! In fact, his growth outpaced all other children we knew going all the way back until the previous child was born. Adjusted for "inflation" though, I'm told it was only average growth.
Generally speaking, you'll want to present both. "From 6th to 7th grade, I went from 200 cm to 205 cm in height, a 2.5% increase." Otherwise, as you say, people will ask for N= or for %, or even starting asking for median IQR and statistical tests of difference. I do tire of oversimplistic analyses in popular media which present whichever one of the above measures is most in line with their narrative.
Ethiopia is not an easy place to travel. People are friendly but reserved. English it not very common there. They are not the African "buddy" type of people (ey man, lets have a beer!). If you are into adventure, go to the Bale mountains and take a three day horse ride expedition and try to see the Ethiopian fox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_wolf
Or take a two week expedition on horsed to see the Ethiopian lions (unfortunately longer that my ass can sustain on a horse). AFAIK the only lions that live in the jungle. It is a rough place. I like it. Possibly love it, but Ethiopia is not for everyone.
I don't care about what you think about "black stereotypes".
But try to see the difference between welcoming Uganda (based on a statistic they are the most welcoming nation to foreigners) and Ethiopians. Yet, they are nearly neighbors.
I don't dislike that the Ethiopians are reserved. What did one of the rangers tell me? We are dirty. We don't have showers. We don't have washing machines. We are dirty. But we know that we are dirty. We are dirty but not stupid!
A 20 year expat (speak, before the Ethiopia hype( told me this joke:
How to shoot an Ethiopian? Aim 1 meter above his hear. You have to hit his ego!
Yes, they are a special kind of people and they take proud in it. If they ever throw me out of my current home, Ethiopia may be, besides Colombia, my second destination. It is happening there!
Colombia caught my attention when I lived in the states. But before I come to Colombia, lets talk about Brazil.
I fell in love with Brazil many years ago. Many people did, some may still do. It was an amazing place. People were super friendly, the women were curious about foreigners...
Today Brazil is much less welcoming for foreigners, even slightly xenophobic. They still have an economic crisis and I wonder what will happen if the world economy cools down. It also has become dangerous again. People change, countries change, I may have changed.
So this brings us to Colombia. It is very cheap to fly there from the states. I had many adventures there, got certified in scuba diving, slept on a tiny house on an island when scuba diving, learned horse riding in Saint Augustin, got lost in the mountains when hiking near Armenia (visit Salento!). Partied super hard at night in Medellin, Cali and Bogota. People were super friendly, approaching me and other travelers and telling us how happy they are the things have changed in Colombia and foreigners are now visiting. The climate is super interesting since you are near the equator but also have the Andean mountains. You basically can get every temperature you want. From hot Caribbean (and overrated) Cartagena, to the city of eternal spring, Medellin, to cold Bogota. I love the Candelaria district in Bogota (as I once loved Santa Teresa in Rio). It is a magic place and brings me happiness.
People change, countries change, and I may change again. What worries me about Colombia is that more and more foreigners are coming (voted as number ?. tourist destination last year). This is seldom a good thing. Sooner or later the place will change and people will get fed up with tourists. SO if you want to visit, better visit now and not in 10 years.
Literature, there is not only 100 years of solitude, try to appreciate Nicolás Gómez Dávila.
What? You reaching man.
There are a lot of cultural stereotypes from different African countries, just like how Americans see Germans as 'cold and reserved' and Italians as 'loud and friendly'.
I spend a lot of time in Ethiopia for my company. In many parts of Addis Ababa, the entire skyline is under construction - you can't look up anywhere without seeing a new building in progress. The sound of hammers is ubiquitous. You can tell the place is booming.
Most of the large construction projects are run by Chinese companies, especially the Chinese State Construction Corp. New airport terminal, ministries, hotels, convention center, light rail, and so on. This has caused some discussion around Chinese taking construction jobs etc. You'll see these state-funded Chinese construction projects in pretty much every African country.
Although Addis is booming, the population still primarily lives in the countryside, and their quality of life is a lot lower. It's misleading to look at average income across the entire population because the city's economy is so far ahead of the rest of the country. This has probably contributed to some of the unrest.
This reminds me of the DW documentary I watched on their (Chinese) "aid" work in Africa. The Chinese gov lends money to they country and makes them use Chinese companies to do all the work and thus effectively brings much of the money back while dropping the legal obligation on the citizens of that nation.
Many Western aid projects are also thinly disguised subsidies for well-connected companies back home. The main difference with China is sheer scale and the fact that they tend to import their own labor as well.
There was an interesting article about other such deals with the Chinese. The Chinese would make a deal with an African nation and dump products on the market that they couldn't sell in nations who had an actual choice or quality standards that were enforced. The market would be flooded by cheap garbage tools, electronics, and etc. Quality products would disappear quickly as they were many times more expensive.... and then everyone realizes everything is garbage.
Interesting enough the construction sites contain none of these tools (the Chinese workers don't use them), and the locals now can't afford to bring them on a special order because they're either locked out of the market or many more times expensive than before due to the trade deal. Crappy state run industries just keep on trucking at the expense of the locals in Africa.
>The Chinese would make a deal with an African nation and dump products on the market that they couldn't sell in nations who had an actual choice or quality standards that were enforced. The market would be flooded by cheap garbage tools, electronics, and etc. Quality products would disappear quickly as they were many times more expensive.... and then everyone realizes everything is garbage.
You've described free trade in a nutshell. More industrialized nations love these kinds of trade policies.
You're being down-voted, but this is very similar to the US's policy on agricultural goods -- they provide "aid" (read: dump cheap staple goods like corn and wheat) into markets, which forces the domestic industries to grow produce that doesn't grow well in the US and export it at favorable rates.
These countries are then dependent upon the US for staple crops. And when international prices for staples rise relative to exports, then their citizens are the first in line to starve, as the aid is conveniently just enough to eliminate domestic industries but not enough to feed everyone. See: Mexican Tortilla Riots & Arab Spring.
I think you're attributing malice when maybe there is just inconsistent and/or competing policies written by multiple competing/overlapping bureaucracies. See this other [1] DW documentary I watched on EU ag. policies (which I'd bet are very similar to US). Jist of it is they are heavily subsidizing (with price floors) domestic (German) production while trying to spur production (with more subsidization) in the donee country that are unable to compete.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dv3hSNhRaNU
Your point doesn't diminish his statement though - This has been the de facto method of economoic imperialism for the past 3 decades or so, and all of a sudden it's a problem because China is doing so?
I don't care to get into a prolonged discussion of this as we are likely not gonna change each other's mind and I have to watch last night's episode of Westworld. Your use of "economic imperialism" has an inherently negative connotation which leads me to believe you also view these policies as inherently malice (i.e. nefarious intent). My point was that I believe the failings of our aid/development policies is more easily attributed to competing/overlapping bureaucracies than any pols malice intent. JFK establish USAID to help feed the hungry and it has a done a pretty good job (failings and all). I never stated that US policies weren't problematic but I'd put the values of our county over China's all day.
> I'd put the values of our county over China's all day
You say that as if your country's values are static. Any possible reading of history could not honestly conclude that. I'm not singling out your country by the way. But by way of a single example, look at your (and my) country's treatment of refugees and immigrants. No one is calling to "bring me your huddled masses". My country's (Australia) refugee policy definitely has an explicitly malicious intent - the use of indefinite detention against non-criminals in order to deter others.
Values change. Also, values are not a monolith. They are a spectrum. In some areas, the value gaps are definitely closing.
History ain't done yet.
> You've described free trade in a nutshell.
Canada and the US have very healthy activity in cross border free trade, but I'm unable to tell which of those two countries is the aggressor and which the victim.
And yet, Canada had to legislate a domestic automobile industry into existence (By forcing US auto manufacturers to open plants in Canada if they wanted to sell there), instead of just letting the big three import their cars. Without it, eastern Canada would lose tens of thousands of well-paid jobs.
Oh, and as soon as Canada had a competitive product in the aerospace industry (from Bombardier), the United States government slapped the company with a 200% import tariff. And here I thought that free trade benefits all parties...
If Ethopia by some miracle became a leading auto manufacturer, I assure you, the free trade rhetoric would find some way to protect GM, Chrystler-Fiat, and Ford from it. The United States is not interested in being a resource economy, with value-added industry happening somewhere else.
There's an $800 billion trade deficit with Canada since 2000. They typically import about $250b-$280b per year in US goods.
If Canada is the victim, then woe is poor China and Germany. Must suck to have the world's largest economy devouring your exports.
What’s the source of these numbers?
While I'm sympathetic generally I'm not a big fan of classifying all such trade as the same. There are deals that are clearly better than others, and some that are far far worse.
Which is why anti-trust laws exist, and why 'dumping' is an activity that is usually prohibited.
Which is why (i) it's not "free trade" then and (ii) multinationals love places where these restrictions don't apply.
Which reminds me of the book "Confessions of an Economic Hit Man." Sounds like he hit it on the nose.
What did you expect? Borrowing a foreign currency means you can only use it to buy foreign products from a macroscopic perspective. Exchanging currency just moves it around because someone else still has the chinese currency and will use it to buy chinese products.
The bigger question is if they will have an export surplus to china which is neccessary to repay the loans. This is how china paid back it's loans.
This makes me think of the stories from a few years ago, about how Ethiopia was engaging in extensive telecommunications surveillance and control.
It makes me wonder about corresponding relationships between the parent's description and this, if any. (Not that I haven't already been wondering; it reminds me of this.)
Seems like a printed-money-fueled bubble to me.
There was an interesting Danish documentary on foreign investments in Ethiopia titled "Dead donkeys fear no hyena's" [1]. It came down that economic investments (including from the World Bank) are used to drive indigenous people from their lands, that land is sold (outside of the public eye) to anonymous foreign agricultural corporations to start industrialized agriculture. However, those corporations will just export everything abroad, leaving the local people with little return, and, most importantly, without food. Promises of compensation, relocation and education are, of course, neglected, and people who dare to protest are met with arms.
1. http://www.deaddonkeysfearnohyenas.com/
> "Dead Donkeys Fear No Hyenas was triggered by a seemingly trivial scene at the airport in Addis Ababa, six years back. Waiting for my flight late at night, I happened to see some tired workers at the tarmac who were loading food products on an airplane destined for Europe. At the same time, another team was busy unloading sacks with food aid from a second plane. It took some time to realize the real meaning of it – that this famine struck country, where millions are dependent on food aid, is actually exporting food to us."
This is straight out of the Potato Famine. :(
>food products on an airplane destined for Europe. At the same time, another team was busy unloading sacks with food aid from a second plane.
while everyone should acknowledge the degree of poverty that is still rampant in countries like Ethiopia, that image is not particularly well suited to make a point.
It can be true that at the same time that Ethiopian farmers sell produce to Europe, while people from somewhere else try to alleviate poverty in the country.
It would not make sense for farmers in Ethiopia to stop trading food with the world at large just because people in the country are hungry. In fact, depending on whatever economic transaction is going on, the food coming in might be significantly cheaper than the food going out. Trade and reducing poverty or hunger are not at odds.
The goal should be to generate better incomes and social services for poor Ethiopians, not stopping businesses from trading with Ethiopia globally.
> It can be true that at the same time that Ethiopian farmers sell produce to Europe.
It is mentioned multiple times in the movie, and in these comments, that it is not Ethiopian farmers those who trade with anyone. Foreign corporations on incognito or behind domestic providers are those who suck money out of a poor country presumably without or with astonishingly weak trade legislature. More strikingly, doing so at the cost of famine of the blatantly low paid workers while violating not only ethics but also human rights of those exploited humans.
If those corporations were so savvy investors they would make profit at home under well ordered trade system.
Farming high value cash crops for export and importing rice should be perfectly fine, agreed. But the problem of foreign investors taking all the gains abroad, forever, after striking some very one-sided deals through power imbalance and/or knowledge imbalance and/or one-time paying off some representatives remains untouched by that argument.
Actually I believe that for a country rich in cash crop potential, some form of communism might actually be not so bad (e.g. free market with a strong legal bias favoring the formation of co-ops in agriculture). Certainly not worse than an economy dominated by a few plantation lords (doubly so if those are foreign entities), if that's the only alternative. I wouldn't suggest anything for Ethiopia though, wouldn't suggest anything, just too dang little knowledge about the place (and my personal threshold for feeling comfortable with playing armchair president is embarrassingly low).
These are all solvable problems without requiring the expropriation of foreign investors. A sensible legislature which allows workers to unionize and a tax collecting agency which actually does its job - in short working institutions - can reduce most of these problems.
But what happens most of the time in these unstable African governments is that they gravitate from one extreme to another: Either they enforce zero workers rights and exert very little control over foreign investors - allowing them to pay bribes to individuals rather than taxes which would benefit state run institutions. Or they nationalize every last farm and shop in the country, scaring away foreign investment and know-how and end up with lower productivity and mismanagement of local industries.
You are saying this, as if the decision to strip the population from their subsistence and working rights was made ONLY by local politicians. This is in fact a collusion between politicians and foreign investors. In this collusion, foreign investors have much more responsibility because, after all, local corrupt politicians have less opportunities than foreign capital owners, and therefore it is harder for them to make ethical decisions. Moreover, developed countries love to put all the responsibility of corruption in the hands of local politicians, as if they were really supporting in some way the non-corrupt ones, which is completely untrue as anyone from a third world country will point out.
I agree that it's a collusion between politicians and foreign investors. I wouldn't go so far as saying that one party has more responsibility than the other. But I would add a third party that also carries responsibility: The electorate - if the country in question has a democracy.
Even in a mature democracy, like in the USA, it is difficult for voters to determine who is acting in their interest due to the multiple layers of non-declared interests that exist in each political party. Now imagine what happens in a poor country. Your supposition that the electorate is responsible for this is as true as assuming that a victim of theft is responsible for the robbery.
Once a country has reached certain threshold of poverty, elections can get very sensitive to bought support. Maybe not direct, checked "money for vote" transactions, but gaining "genuine" support by being generous (genuine as in the voters don't realize that they are being manipulated).
And if toxic investors are clever, they might even support every major candidate a little: they have already reached their goal if the eventual winner believes that his secret supporter was acting as kingmaker. Might be much cheaper in total than actually forcing a result with money.
It's actually historically the normal case that governments try for the sensible middle road, then get pushed towards communism by the West. Allende, for instance, was pretty liberal - but the USA was convinced he was a communist, and torpedoed the Chilean economy.
>Actually I believe that for a country rich in cash crop potential, some form of communism might actually be not so bad
The international community / western marketplace obliterates any country that dares expropriate / nationalize the lands of the (white colonialist) landholding class.
Just look at how the West has cut off Cuba and Venezuela.
Not true in Ethiopia's case, it was never a colony for any meaningful amount of time.
It defies the "african countries are poor only due to the oppressive white colonialism" narrative.
EDIT: As for Venezuela, 1 USD was ~6-7 Venezuelan bolívars in 2013.
Last time I checked it was roughly 1,100,000. A staggering 180 000 times drop in only 5 years.
External political climate remained roughly the same in that time span.
> Just look at how the West has cut off Cuba
The US cut off Cuba, but even with US retaliatory sanctions much of the rest of the West did not.
Add Guatemala 1953 for an even more blatant example. Or the ousting of Allende in Chile. Nothing short of disgusting.
On the contrary, the image itself is uncomfortably well suited to make a point. This comment is a classic example of defending an obvious absurdity of capitalism by appealing to the overall system.
It's true that individuals are all acting rationally, and that imposing limits on exports would not be a panacea. However, at the most basic level, it is monstrous that food exports are happening in the context of local starvation. The rationality of the outcome within capitalism shouldn't blind us to the absurdity of the outcome itself.
There's really nothing absurd about this. A country like Ethiopia consists of independent actors. Someone might sell food abroad to Europe, someone in Europe might decide to send food to Ethiopia.
There's really no way to stop this other than to outlaw all exports of food while starting to centrally distribute food in Ethiopia. This is neither productive nor would it reduce the amount of starving people in Ethiopia. In fact, it would increase the amount of poverty.
There are certainly poor people who have trouble affording basic goods in California. Still the solution is not to stop all exports of goods from California to Washington and vice versa. This would just make everybody worse off.
Any country that pretend to develop and keep some independence need to prioritize a minimum of food production. That's a strategic need. Europe is a good example of that, where food production is strongly protected. I bet is the same in the States.
The point of the original post is that those "independent actors" are not "independents", not from Ethiopia.
> Any country that pretend to develop and keep some independence need to prioritize a minimum of food production. That's a strategic need.
To turn this back to software, I am strongly reminded of Joel Spolsky’s discussion of when and what to outsource:
https://www.joelonsoftware.com/2001/10/14/in-defense-of-not-...
“If it’s a core business function — do it yourself, no matter what.”
- "independent actors are acting rationally in this situation."
- "the only alternative is this particular strawman policy, which would make things worse"
- "there's nothing absurd about people starving due to preventable causes"
A thing could be both morally/ethically absurd and, when viewed through the tinted lens of capitalism, totally logical, rational, and expected.
> It's true that individuals are all acting rationally
At least one party in the food market isn't acting rationally. The situation where food is produced in Ethiopia for consumption in Europe and food is produced in Europe for consumption in Ethiopia could equivalently be solved by keeping the food in its country of origin and everyone saves on transport costs.
But maybe the Ethiopian "food" was just something like coffee beans which can't really feed a population, in which case there also isn't any problem with exporting them.
That is a simplistic argument that ignores trade. Sure Ethiopia could grow it own food: cut down the coffee trees (bush?) and plant something else. What you are missing is that those foods that would replace the coffee tree don't grow as well in Ethiopia as coffee does.
Both Ethiopia and Europe would be worse off for your plan. Ethiopia because instead of the profit from coffee they subsistence farm something that doesn't grow as well. Europe because they don't have coffee and they get even more of the crops they already grow too much of.
Now some have pointed out that the profit from Ethiopian coffee might not got to Ethiopia. That might be true (I don't know), but even if so, Ethiopia retains more money than if they quit exporting coffee and the profits.
This is all well and good as long as Ethiopia can buy more food then it could have grown in those coffee fields.
Unfortunately, it also puts it at the mercy of forex rates, collapse of their monoculture, food shortages in other parts of the world causing rising food prices, any disruptions in foreign trade... Any of those things go south, and now you have millions of starving people. Sitting on a pile of coffee beans.
Why do you think the US government pushes billions of dollars into agriculture subsidies? Wouldn't it be so much cheaper if it just imported all of its food from abroad - where farmers get paid ~$1/day, instead of $6/hour.
There's a simple reason - it's because it doesn't want food riots, caused by some factor outside of their control. Nothing brings about regime change faster then the price of bread. [1] No well-ran country wants to be dependent on food, or oil imports.
Ironically, these same agriculture subsidies are what cripples agriculture in other nations - they can't always compete with Uncle Sam's subsidies.
[1] Just ask Mubarak. Or the Romanovs.
> everyone saves on transport costs
These things became more common in the modern world because transport costs fell so low that it doesn't matter in most cases.
> it is monstrous that food exports are happening in the context of local starvation
This is only absurd if you consider the nation-state to be the fundamental unit of mutual aid.
If you consider a different division of population - the corporation, or the city-state, or the tribe, or the individual, for example - it makes perfect sense. Even before "monstrous" capitalism, you'd get plenty of situations where one tribe would actively pillage the farms of a neighboring tribe - food "exports" and local starvation.
You might argue that this is monstrous as well, and I'd even agree with you, but that's an argument against being shitty to your fellow human beings, and not specifically against capitalism. Capitalism is just yet another definition of "tribe", where the corporation that employs you is the tribe that you owe allegiance to, damn all the other tribes.
Yes, before capitalism, which is bad, things were even worse. I can critique both capitalism and what came before it. And it's not just an argument"against being shitty."
Capitalism really doesn't have anything to do with tribalism though. Workers don't have any allegiance whatsoever to their employer beyond that dictated by the imperative of not starving to death. The structural constraint under critique is the one where capital seeks to maximize profits regardless of the human cost. So, when a grower exports food for money instead of giving it to starving people for free, that's what I'm talking about.
It seems to me that the problem is that open markets (capitalism is too general for this I think) is sold like the perfect panacea that will solve all the problems, even if the evidence is against it.
The path followed for development by the developed nations have nothing to do with the path they (we?) recommend to underdeveloped nations.
>Trade and reducing poverty or hunger are not at odds.
This is a statement that is not necessarily true on its face.
When the country's currency is gradually inflated away to worthlessness [1] and economic prospects are limited for non-landowning classes of people, trade and reducing poverty can indeed be at odds. You need only look at history [2] to see the real effect imperialist export policies can have on a population.
1. https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=USD&to=ETB&view=10Y 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
It's striking, but trading a small amount of high-priced food for a much larger amount of low-priced food might be a good trade, provided that the imported food somehow gets to the people who need it.
To get some real insight into this we'd need to find out what goes wrong when that last step doesn't happen.
It is the same thing that allowed someone to decide to grow high priced export crops instead of feeding their neighbours. And the same thing that allows them to trade their crops for money.
The country of Ethiopia is not one collective organization but made up of individuals. The enclosure of resources for individuals allow independent trade and returns, meaning that gains are not distributed across society but held by the individual.
It is the same system everywhere.
Why are schools underfunded? Why are homeless shelters underfunded? Why are food banks underfunded?
Productivity is best held in individual hands. Taxation is the best mechanism to distribute wealth. However the taxes go through political hands and is thus corruptible.
> However the taxes go through political hands and is thus corruptible.
Seems like an individual with too much money is just as corruptable.
This might go terribly wrong in the case where profits from this trade goes to foreign held companies, who pay the farmers next to nothing for their work, taking advantage of the situation where people are literally dying of starvation.
Or the famines of British India.
There is value in learning history, makes an excellent crib sheet.
They are airfreighting food aid in?
A lot of things don't make sense to people who don't understand economics.
When the land is sold who earns that money ?
How do the foreign companies grow produce ? Do they employ local people ?
From examples of India I personally feel the real issue here is the inability of the country to clearly enforce property rights and especially for poor and tribal people. (Tribal people might be better off selling off land to richer corporation and working in those fields as an employee)
We absolutely should donate to end extreme poverty. And we should make our governments work towards this effort.
But are the people employed, at what is admittedly low wages, better off than the alternative?
And if we in the EU pressure for fair wages, then might this not be better than nothing?
You know the corruption mindset and very bad things are on the horizon when your gouvernement can't or is unwilling to protect its territory from foreign actors :/.
I’m generally loathe to make blanket statements about organizations, because they are made up of many people with many motives...
But I’m pretty sure this is the entire purpose of the World Bank. Scam weak nations out of their resources and give them to extranational corporations.
I think they have a “do good” arm but the “extricate resources” arm has final say. If the do good arm ever, say, started returning large amounts of productive land to indigenous farmers, that program would be quietly killed.
The net effect of the do good arm is then just PR for the extricating of resources.
That's foolish. In order to start the gears of capitalism turning in a country you have to start somewhere. As the standard economic development model goes, agriculture -> industry -> services.
In Ethiopia they are starting with advanced agriculture, and the World Bank is critical in jump starting that process. Foreign companies need to participate in a local economy when there are no local alternatives.
The people don't get the food produced on their farms because they can't afford the food. They can't afford it because the Ethiopian economy is in its infancy. Sure it doesn't feel right when the food is being shipped out of the country, but that's how capitalism works.
If Ethiopia plays by the rules of the game for the next few decades then their economy will grow the problems we see in today's Ethiopia will be diminished.
Starting this process is the purpose of the World Bank.
If Ethiopians starve for a generation or two, maybe those who got rich by taking their land will employ their grandkids for minimum wage.
Maybe there's a better way without inherent suffering?
>The people don't get the food produced on their farms because they can't afford the food. They can't afford it because the Ethiopian economy is in its infancy. Sure it doesn't feel right when the food is being shipped out of the country, but that's how capitalism works.
>If Ethiopia plays by the rules of the game for the next few decades then their economy will grow the problems we see in today's Ethiopia will be diminished.
If someone came to you with this proposition, that your region would grow in a few decades (maybe in time for your grandchildren to benefit) while you watch your neighbors starve and the profits and food from your countries land is shipped overseas for the majority of your adult life, I hope you would do the sane thing and tell that person to fuck off.
The "rules of the game" are "get yours, and get it now by whatever means capable", which is what countries with capability do and will continue to do. If their actions result in any benefit to the world outside their borders, it is incidental.
> The people don't get the food produced on their farms because they can't afford the food. They can't afford it because the Ethiopian economy is in its infancy. Sure it doesn't feel right when the food is being shipped out of the country, but that's how capitalism works.
So people starve because they cannot afford to eat the food that they farm. If that's how capitalism works then maybe capitalism needs some adjustments.
It's working out pretty well for China, which started out with essentially nothing in terms of a capital base.
Law, order and prudent fiscal/monetary policy are all it takes. If Ethiopia can guarantee these things then the international community of capitalism will reward it and its citizens will reap the rewards.
This is not news , Africa is the only continent that produces what it doesn't need but imports all that it needs. It is very unfortunate that Africans have not been able to break this colonial structure.
Unlike most of Africa, Europeans never colonized Ethiopia. The closest they got is a 5-year occupation during World War II which is too short to count as true colonization.
The Italian occupation was definitely an attempt at colonization. We can argue if it was considered temporarily successful or not, but I’m not sure what true colonization is like I’m not sure what a true Scotsman is.
Yeah they definitely tried to colonize Ethiopia then. We're agreeing. They simply failed to stay long enough to convert an occupation into a colonization.
I think that is stretching the definition of colonization too far.
Using the same logic, Western countries tried to colonize Russia in 1919 and Nazi Germany colonized quite a bit of Europe during WWII.
Until now?
This is still true. They do receive some foreign aid money from Western countries, including the US, but that's different from being a colony even if it is a tie to the global economic and geopolitical system.
> Africa
An assertion about "Africa" is like an assertion about "Asia", which includes everything from Russia to Thailand to India to China to Turkmenistan to Iran to Japan to North Korea. There are few assertions one can make about all of Africa, which covers Egypt to Morocco to South Africa to Kenya to Liberia to Madagascar, and so much in between.
> the only continent that produces what it doesn't need but imports all that it needs
That's normal trade behavior. You produce things in which you have comparative advantage, then trade them for things that others produce more efficiently.
France produces far more wine than it needs and Japan produces far more cars than it needs because both are great at making those things. Then they trade; resources are used most efficiently, because both are more efficient at producing their specialty; and consumers get the best products in the world. You get more for less. Otherwise you'd have lots of Japanese wine and French cars.
But when what you export is mere commodities without adding extra value you are most likely to get little in returns . Africa is hollow inside , no manufacturing going on within sub Sahara. The only industry in this region is extractive ones . And their so-called products are not even priced locally , they have little or no control at setting prices.
Downvote because I said the obvious.
They can start with the corrupt scum that enable this behavior, for example local warlords/political kingmakers that ingratiate themselves to the foreign markets and blatantly enrich themselves at the expense of their neighbors. They're not all "victims."
This is good, but there are some potential problems.
1. Ethiopia's GDP per capita is ~$700 USD, so this growth is from a very low base.
2. Total fertility rate is 4.28. Compare this to China at 1.57 and USA at 1.84. This means that some of the growth just goes to supporting a larger population.
3. I have read elsewhere that you need government connections and a lot of money to do business in Ethiopia. So the benefits of this growth might not be as broad as they otherwise could be.
Interesting points you raise, I thought about calculating this by-hand, but then I realized that actual numbers are published by actual economists.
Here are some old figures:
https://tradingeconomics.com/ethiopia/gdp-per-capita-growth-...
In that year, GDP growth was 7.5%, but per-capita GDP growth was 4.9%. I could have some gaps in my knowledge of the meanings in these figures, but I think the difference roughly equates to what you speculate - that population growth eats some of the economic growth when viewed from the perspective of the individual.
Also important to note, I think that these are nominal, not real figures. So right now, I think we would reasonably expect sub-5% real per-capita growth. Even correcting for that I'm sure it's an astounding pace of improvement. It's hard to wrap your head around multi-year improvements in quality of life of that scale.
But there's a depressing side, that maybe some nations are actually contracting in per-capita real GDP.
That's a real growth rate (not nominal).
They have 15% annual inflation.
Some thoughts on your points:
1. True, but not radically different from the rest of Africa. Further the PPP figure is about $1700, which is a bit more indicative of purchasing power / standard of wealth. 10% growth in Ethiopia may not be as impressive as say China growing 10%, but it's still 10% growth that few African countries can match consistently. Having $170 extra can mean better nutrition, a cellphone, a bicycle, communal investments etc. Moreover, it shows good prospects and stability, the type of conditions necessary to attract FDI and cheap borrowing rates going into the future.
2. Not really. Fertility rates tend to have a strong negative relationship with wealth. The best thing you can do to reduce fertility rates is improve economic prospects in a country. Populations aren't growing because fertility rates, they're going down. Populations are growing because general healthcare and life expectancy has improved radically in the past 50 years or so.
3. That's the case all over Africa, but rising tides lift all boats at least to some extent. I mean, take a look at South Korea. It had a dictatorship until the 80s and was extremely corrupt, we still see high-profile cases of corruption (right to the 43rd prime minister resigning on corruption charges in 2016). Corruption is obviously not desirable and indeed distributions benefits unevenly, but there are many countries (like Korea) which have a history of high-corruption and rapidly growing socioeconomic conditions of ordinary citizens.
1. I agree. I was pointing that out more to show that even with impressive growth rates they still have a long way to go.
2. I agree that TFR declines with wealth, but it is still true that if your population is growing your economy has to grow faster to compensate for it. I am not sure how quickly TFR falls as the economy grows. If it lags significantly this will still have an effect.
3. This one is trickier. There are large differences between the poor African countries and the previously poor Asian countries. The authoritarian governments in South Korea, Taiwan, and China actually helped these countries get out of poverty because they could enforce policies that otherwise would not be popular, like redistribution of land to peasants and protecting infant industries from foreign competition while they developed. Japan was a little different (actually so was China) but had similar policies. These policies are not being implemented in Africa.
The corruption in Asia and the corruption in Africa are also of a different kind. South Korea allowed some corruption as long as the managers of the companies involved where able to produce globally competitive products. In Africa the corruption has largely enriched a small number of well connected people while doing nothing to help the local population. I am not sure how corrupt Ethiopia is.
Either way, I wasn't talking about corruption as much as the difficulty of doing business in Ethiopia, which seems to be difficult if you do not already have money and connections, which suggests that the benefits of economic growth will be more concentrated than they otherwise could be and they have in the Asian countries that successfully emerged from poverty.
Africa has had 50 years to adopt better policies, but instead we see frequent civil wars, endemic corruption, and poor governance. These problems aren't insurmountable, but they are large.
I'm puzzled by your comment:
>>" The authoritarian governments in South Korea, Taiwan, and China actually helped these countries get out of poverty because they could enforce policies that otherwise would not be popular, like redistribution of land to peasants and protecting infant industries from foreign competition while they developed."
Those are not popular policies? do you mean popular for the IMF and the World bank or what?
Well the land redistribution isn't popular with landowners, who tend to have a lot of power. The industry protection isn't popular with the IMF and World Bank and is often abused or helps corrupt people in government funnel money to their family and friends.
You're probably right that sometimes there is popular support for these policies but it's hard to get them in place.
The answer here is education. Build schools, problem solved.
Schools don't help if there are no jobs after graduation, which is the case in much of Africa. The problems these countries face is staggering, not insurmountable, but really hard.
Zimbabwe built schools. But corrupted it's citizens.
Fertility rate will come down as incomes rise and child mortality falls. Until recently Ethiopia had one of the world's highest child mortality rates so I would expect some significant lag.
The $700 figure looks to be 3 years and about 30% out of date.
It all depends on whether you have sustained growth, but that's where China started roughly 3 decades ago: https://tradingeconomics.com/china/gdp-per-capita.
That's true. China had some advantages at the local level though, in that many of the reforms were actually first done by the peasants and tacitly allowed by the government until Deng Xiaoping allowed economic reform to happen.
I think Ethiopia has some really tough challenges ahead of it, but it will obviously be good for them and good for Africa if they can make it work.
There's also potential trouble brewing wih Egypt over Ethiopia damming the Nile, on which Egypt is completely dependent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Ethiopian_Renaissance_Da...
It's interesting to me how the problem of "who owns what parts of this river?" is playing out in so many parts of the world. Off the top of my head we have the Nile with Egypt and Ethiopia, the Yangtze (edit: this should be Mekong) with China and much of southeast Asia, the Murray river in southwest Australia (bickering states rather than countries, but still) . . . and this is just what I've read in the Economist this year.
Is this really that new? Has damming technology only recently made these issues relevant?
Iran/Iraq/Syria has an on-going conflict about dams and use of their vital river. Can't for the life of me remember the name of the river though.
What is the Euphrates River.
LOL. The GP's first sentence really does read like a jeopardy clue.
Thanks!
I don't believe Iran is involved though as the Euphrates does not flow through it. I think you might mean Turkey.
This same story played out a hundred years ago in the USA, see the Colorado River Compact.
I would initially guess it's a problem now for the rivers you mention because only now do these places have the capital & use for a dam.
And, really, fights over water never end. It's a difficult good- vital to life, inexpensive to divert, and yet both limited & temporal in supply, & difficult to relocate. Additionally, the source is frequently within another state or country. No one has been terribly successful yet in implementing water markets, and no one has conjured a perfect way to apportion water rights- with right of first use & riparian rights both having obvious flaws.
Crazy things happen with water. For example, where I live I am not allowed to capture the water that falls on my own property. It's owned by someone else, and I can be prosecuted for capturing it (with a loophole for garden rainbarrels)
http://www.un.org/waterforlifedecade/transboundary_waters.sh...
According to the UN, this is very old, citing a water treaty from 2500BC on the Tigris.
Portugal and Spain too. Conditions change (e.g. there was a drought in these two countries), needs change, etc; there's probably always a conflict somewhere.
What's the issue with the Yangtze? It only flows within China?
Depends what you count as China; the Yangtze, Yellow River and Mekong all originate in Tibet. They're probably the primary reason why China is so absolutely adamant that Tibet is and has always been part of China; losing that water would represent an existential threat.
And why China sees global warming as such a huge problem.
I imagine the OP means the Mekong
Exponential population increase would certainly drive increased demand for water.
Land ownership is also an issue - I believe (no expert, don't quite me) you can get a 99 year lease.
Ethiopia seemingly has an incredibly good relationship with China. The lion's share of FDI in Ethiopia is from China, and much of it goes towards large infrastructure projects. Flying through the airport in Addis recently I was surprised to see multiple Chinese restaurants, a special lounge for Chinese travelers, and signs everywhere in Chinese.
It's great to see economic cooperation working out so well on so many levels!
Ethiopian here
Yes, Chinese contractors are having a big boom (banks, stadiums, airports & roads)
There's a shortage of foreign currency due to the mega projects underway - medicine, electronics, car prices have nearly doubled
> medicine, electronics, car prices have nearly doubled
What about salaries? Is the net result positive for you?
Salaries went up a bit also tax was reduced - needless to say the price spikes aren't proportional but it's a start
I imagine most or almost all of those jobs are going to chinese firms and citizens
> There's a shortage of foreign currency due to the mega projects underway
Could you elaborate? How is there a shortage if there's a ton of foreign investment coming in?
Not all mega infrastructure projects are foreign aid/loan financed. For example the 6000 MW Nile Grand Renaissance Dam is self financed by Ethiopia.
Beside there is a deficit between export and import leading to currency shortage.
https://www.reuters.com/article/ethiopia-energy-idUSL6N0N91Q...
This sounds more like a case of rental values of locations increasing, as the price of prime urban land is bid up, requiring laborers be paid more to achieve the same standard of living, and inflating costs across the board.
Same issue that all booming cities face, whether it is New York, San Francisco, London, Hong Kong, Tokyo, or anywhere else.
Some manage it better than others.
Genuinely curious: As far as you know, are the projects synergistic, or do the Chinese offer lopsided/predatory deals?
As hopeful and excited as I am for Ethiopia, the cynical part of me can't help but see the relationship as less cooperation and more exploitation.
Many countries grew rich off of US exploitation. Japan and then China wouldn't be the power houses they are today if it wasn't for the US needing a place to offload cheap and dirty manufacturing. True, many more countries were just exploited without any gain, but there are factors that can tilt the balance in your favor.
The fact that they're a strong economy with a strong military and have a government wary of imperialism bodes well, as long as the can keep the number of revolutions and civil conflicts low. Stability is the key.
Let's have a nuanced conversation about this. The article suggests that Ethiopia may be trying to position itself as a destination for manufacturing. In today's global economy, regardless of value judgments about its merits, less developed countries have an opportunity because they can offer much lower labor costs than highly-developed states. However, structural changes that result from large-scale gainful employment cause costs to rise over time, as a middle class emerges, people place themselves into global context, and begin to ponder whether they can realistically achieve something better. This is happening in China today.
The continent of Africa remains the last frontier in outsourcing manufacturing, but right now it's not competitive: transport costs are high, there are issues with utilities, capricious governments, and no established concentration of expertise. The Chinese involvement is working hard on improving these for other reasons, but ironically it may enable Ethiopia to begin to take on roles that China has now in the global supply chain. It may also be deliberate: during a gold rush, most money was made by those who enabled the prospectors, not the prospectors themselves.
This might not be as good as you think: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15272413
China will cause the country to become indebted to it and when they can't make the repayments offer to helpfully take full control of it.
coughcoughIMFcough
More broadly, taking on debt to build the infrastructure needed to level up industrial capabilities isn't exploitation. Building better energy grids, transportation, and communication infrastructure is expensive. It's fundamentally no different than software startups taking on fundraising rounds to enable growth. As long as the leadership isn't irresponsible about it, there's nothing wrong with it and it should easily pay for itself.
The important thing for debt-for-infrastructure planning is to keep corruption manageable, so you don't wind up borrowing to build boondoggles that are for the personal enrichment of the the well-connected rather than the good of the country.
At any rate, China is no more predatory in this regard than the IMF, the World Bank, or other western financial institutions. They have a surplus of capital and need to invest it somewhere. The goal is not imperialist, but rather capitalist.
China is more imperial. They have a really long 100 year view. They don't mind losing money to gain a long term advantage.
Yes it's exactly/similar behaviour to the IMF. Doesn't make a difference though to the people.
I think what you say is true, but that you very much underestimate China's imperialist ambitions.
It would be better if you could attempt to support your argument with data, analysis and research.
Is Ethiopia in a lot of debt trouble? From [1], figure 1.17, doesn't seem too troubling, especially when considering its growth rate.
Your assertion that China plans to overload countries with debt also seem to be based on the heavily promoted Sri Lanka story while ignoring any other data points. The Center for Growth Development has a report, [2], Examining the Debt Implications of the Belt and Road Initiative from a Policy Perspective. They find that for the 68 countries analyzed, only 8 are at risk. Your story also contradicts the many times China has provided debt relief.
> In countries suffering from debt distress, the Chinese government has provided debt relief in an ad hoc, case-by-case manner [...] The IMF estimates that China has delivered over 80 percent of what it is expected to provide under HIPC. It was a creditor to 31 of the 36 HIPC countries, and the most recent publicly available information indicates that it provided relief in at least 28 of them, including 100 percent forgiveness for several (e.g., Burundi, Afghanistan, and Guinea). […] China has also demonstrated a willingness to provide additional credit so a borrower can avoid default. A prominent example is China's agreement in early 2017 to extend an RMB 15 billion swap line to Mongolia for three years in support of an IMF Extended Fund Facility.
[1] African Economic outlook: https://www.afdb.org/en/knowledge/publications/african-econo...
[2] PDF Warning: https://www.cgdev.org/sites/default/files/examining-debt-imp...
I said it might not be a good thing and pointed to a an example where it wasn't. The take away was to not just take the information at hand but do you own research (like you did).
"China will cause the country to become indebted to it and when they can't make the repayments offer to helpfully take full control of it."
You honestly can't tell me you don't see that as a loaded statement...And based on your replies to other commentators, doesn't seem like you intended that either.
If the local government is already highly corrupt this might not even ultimately be a bad thing for most Ethiopians.
Which countries have China taken control of in this way so far?
Well if you follow the link and read the article you might have an idea. Here is the NYTimes piece it links to https://www.nytimes.com/2017/09/13/magazine/what-the-worlds-...
It has a little graphic showing China owning Pakistan, Kenya, Djibouti, Myanmar and Sri Lanka.
Note that this is probably also because of foreign travelers in transit through the airport. Ethiopian Airlines is growing fast and is a major player in travel to a lot of African countries. See for instance https://www.reuters.com/article/us-ethiopia-airlines/ethiopi...
A family member on a recent flight between Chad and Addis Abeba told me that 85% of passengers on the flight were Chinese.
A short summary of China's Belt and Road Initiative:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EvXROXiIpvQ (6 min)
It's more than just good relation, its a --quite-- assistant to Ethiopia from Chinese government to export nation build expertise with a goal of creating a prosperous area that ultimately as an investor also can benefit from the development and growth by itself.
Contractors and private companies are just tip of iceberg. A lot of hi level government cooperations , government sponsored think tank activities[1] which might play a more important role than private business activities. Chinese are coaching Ethiopia to build a nation.
It's the same journey that China itself experienced for last 30 years. The nation building expertise partially comes from tons of competing local government policy makers fighting for the prosperity of their home cities on the vast experiment field of 1.3 billion people, but in early years of struggle also from Hongkong,Taiwan entrepreneurs and even a foreign government with their management expertise when China was as poor as many Africa countries and with no expertise. During the time (in 1996) I created the first web site for CS-SIP[2], I witnessed local Chinese government officials learned from Singapore coaches like pupils.
Why Ethiopia? Because although it's a democracy but the Ethiopian political ecosystem is closer to an "Orwellian regime" that makes building nation possible. It's totally not because Chinese particularly like a regime. Actually Chinese are ideology agnostic and pragmatic. Chinese have a better understanding that this kind of "oppressive" governance creates less chaos. For example Chinese construction contractors almost always hire Chinese worker from China. The real reason is those are the only qualified teams[3] be able to get the job done. However in a democratic countries some sponsored NGO and activists will speak out the "true" that Chinese companies have job discrimination against local people. Then there are massive protests by local people Th Projects can not continue. These incidents happened many times in non-regime countries.
Why quite? Isn't nation building expertise is more valuable and worth to promote than business building expertise so larger population can benefit from? There are a couple of reasons:
1.Western journalists are almost all belief driven people with a little different mindset of HN readers with proof driven thinking. Most of them are activists in the guise Journalist who want to promote their own ideology. They mentally deny the real cause of fast growth in Ethiopia because both governments are regimes so they unintentional hide the truth.
2.Chinese government don't want to be to visible so the nation building is less likely to be interrupted. The international community won't see Chinese effort as an mutual beneficial economic activity but as an expansion to gain regional influence like Soviet Union or Iran because international community is largely brain washed by Orwell's works like 1984 which used to be valid many years ago and still valuable but not applicable everywhere any more.
[1]I have a old friend did consulting job helping policy making for Ethiopia
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Suzhou_Industrial_Park
[3] https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/968608879914270721?lang=...
It’s really not polite to celebrate colonialism.
Ethiopia is one African country that was never really colonised - though it was occupied by Mussolinian Italy for a few years.
This isn't colonialism.
So after reading Factfulness by Hans Rosling and family I'm really interested in investing in African companies. Ideally it would be through index funds. I got as far as finding ABSA as my go to online broker, but couldn't find any indexes to research (just a bunch of broken links)
Would anybody have any resources or direction to point me to?
As an African, I can tell you the biggest issue for investment on the continent is governmental leadership. The incumbent governments tend to hold a large amount of unilateral legal power and generally don't wield it well when it comes to economics (exceptions to this would be a lot of legislation from Kigame in Rwanda, and Mauritius).
Assuming this was fixed, though, I would recommend looking into infrastructure and technology products and services, especially those that are homegrown. These are what most countries need the most and the potential for their growth would be tremendous given the continent's population size.
> Assuming this was fixed, though, I would recommend looking into infrastructure and technology products and services, especially those that are homegrown. These are what most countries need the most and the potential for their growth would be tremendous given the continent's population size.
infrastructure in africa is weird though, most of it goes from the resource rich lands to some port for export.
There is very little infrastructure between african nations in comparison, which hurts inter-african trade a lot, because it usually results in exporting to other countries being cheaper and using the resources to grow the trade between african nations.
Having an internal market (like the EU common market) allows for massive growth of the economies of different nations, it's a shame infrastructure for it does not exist (yet).
Absolutely. There is an African Union (AU), but it is a largely toothless organisation in practice and there is little real collaboration between nations on the continent.
Again, it comes to leadership. Rwanda, as an example, has great business legislation but being a small, landlocked country it will be reliant on good legislation from its neighbours too in order to really blossom, and sadly this is largely missing.
Totally agree that technology products/services have significant role to play in Africa, especially as we have leapfrogged lines and gone direct to mobile. I think the key point as you highlighted is is that its is homegrown - it took me a while to unlearn/adjust my approach when introducing data-focused products to in Addis Ababa, Ethiopia.
as an aside, how do you think governmental leadership relates to the informal nature of many of africa's economies?
i ask because one of the issues that india's legislators have is to create policies which can intelligently regulate a largely off-the-books economy. the results end up looking stupid and not being effective a lot of the time.
I don't know much about Indian government, but the problem with African governments is they tend to operate on a selfish basis, i.e. their legislation is designed around improving public employees (including top leadership) to the detriment of the population.
When the government's legislation is sometimes actively against your welfare as a citizen, I imagine you're much more likely to have off-the-books and informal business. Again, the lack of infrastructure in many places requires citizens to work around these problems and the larger sense of community in most African cultures also makes an informal economy more likely.
These are just anecdotal opinions, though, so take it with a large pinch of salt.
very interesting, thank you for taking the time to respond to me.
You could start with reading Africa-focused capital market news: http://www.africancapitalmarketsnews.com/
There's a Ryan Hoover (not the Product Hunt founder) that blogs about how to open a brokerage account as a foreigner in order to buy stocks in different countries:
https://investinginafrica.net/about/
Vanguard Emerging Markets?
Or these? https://www.investopedia.com/articles/investing/011316/afk-e...
https://kiva.org lets you invest in local people by providing microlending services, but you aren't going to make a return on your investment if that's your motivation.
Though Ethiopia doesn't seem to be one of the countries which currently has loan options at kiva.
@kiva: why not?
New loans get posted periodically. Some countries have more active microlending communities than others.
I work with both domestic and foreign private companies in Ethiopia and the main vehicle to invest here is via equity participation (ex. private equity investments - firms such as KKR, Norfund, Catalyst)) or strategic joint ventures with multinationals. The capital markets are still quite nascent across Africa ( Kenya, South Africa, Nigeria leading the way) so index funds will be challenging. Check out Barclays Africa, Atlas Mara,Standard Bank, Eco Bank, and United Bank to see if they offer options via funds.If you are interested in investing in Ethiopia, happy to discuss further(Shameless plug: Our company provides investment data to support local companies, global investors and policy makers make informed decisions abut Ethiopia's business landscape. I conducted on the ground research and found the lack of data that is easily accessible and informative is a significant problem which hinders the rate of investmentactivity here. Today, we engage with about 450+ local companies across various sectors :)
What is their financial system like? My guess is not very good. I think most of the gains are going to go to private investors, businesses, and other countries that can afford to invest in large projects.
Obviously not the same standards as NYSE or similar exchanges, but I found this link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African_stock_exchange...
The three big ones there actually have a respectable amount of listings (Egypt 833, South Africa 402, Nigeria 223)
Is it not the in other countries? No free Dollars anywhere
At least in the US you can invest in a car company or a mining company for example. In Africa the companies that do anything important are either state owned or foreign companies for the most part (as far as I know).
MTN is not foreign owned. Glo is not foreign owned , Dangote , GTbank , M-net , and many others . Search ft market ..and country of your choice
Financial system varies broadly country to country, but there are virtually no publicly traded African companies. If you wish to invest you need to find private companies willing to take on an investor
Not sure why you're being downvoted. I think what you're saying is correct.
The Johannesburg stock exchange alone has about 400 companies listed, so "virtually none" seems a bit hyperbolic.
Sure, but outside of South Africa I believe what the OP is saying is true. In any case, better to correct him than downvote him without an explanation.
I expect you would find that the biggest companies in most of Africa are either state owned mining and oil companies or western companies operating in Africa. I don't think they have many important publicly traded companies because their financial systems aren't well developed.
Search for stanbic bank south Africa
There are virtually no publicly traded African companies. There are companies like glencore that have operations here, but they’re still European or Asian companies. If you’re looking to invest in African companies you have to put time in on the ground to find private companies suitable for investment.
That's just not true. A more accurate statement would be there are very few African companies listed on American stock exchanges. They are still listed in their home country's exchanges
The daily trade volume on the Ugandan exchange is ~$18,000. Companies may be “listed”, but good luck actually buying any stock
Look at the Nigerian stock exchange or the South African stock exchange or the Morrocan Stock exchange.
Obviously financial infrastructure varies a lot from country to country
You're shifting goalposts.
A lot of African owned companies are in London stock market and debts market
That's a joke. Look at the Casablanca Stock Exchange, $70b. Egypt $400b. South African about $1 trillion. Daily volume is between $50 - $200 million or so. And no, not just European or Asian companies. Plenty of national infrastructure companies, telecom, banking etc.
> There are virtually no publicly traded African companies.
Wow. I'm speechless - how did you arrive at that (incorrect) conclusion? Not only are there plenty of African stock exchanges[1], a lot of publicly traded companies opt to be (dually or exclusively) listed on foreign bourses.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_African_stock_exchange...
We have viable stock markets across the continent, remember Nasper of South Africa, Nigerian Banks , Dangote cement , and thousands of others.
Get you an air popcorn popper and some green Ethiopian coffee beans [0] and enjoy some of their great economy right in your own home!
[0] https://www.sweetmarias.com/green-coffee/africa-arabia/ethio...
I have tried a lot of different coffees, and I personally think Ethiopian is just about the most pleasantly flavorful in the world, at least for my taste. The fresher the better.
Just a few years ago, Libya was the jewel of Africa and led in almost every social and economic metric. I wonder what happened there to throw them so horribly off course?
Kadafi gave up his nukes. We saw the same thing happen in Ukraine after they gave up their nukes.
Do you know what is happening in Iran these past few weeks? And I say this as an Israeli, whom Iran has already threatened to destroy. I understand their position. Moreso if you consider which two countries border Iran to the east and to the west, and what has happened in those two countries not long after the turn of the millennium.
Don't get me wrong, I realize that Europe, Israel, and the US are better off with a non-nuclear Iran. But having seen Libya and Ukraine, I completely understand the Iranian position.
Yeah I recall Mehdi Hasan's article about this some 7 years ago:
"Wouldn't it be rational for Iran – geographically encircled, politically isolated, feeling threatened – to want its own arsenal of nukes, for defensive and deterrent purposes?" Pointing out the difference between America, and its allies, going to "war with non-nuclear Iraq" and their "diplomacy with nuclear-armed North Korea", Hasan concluded: "The simple fact is there is no alternative to diplomacy, no matter how truculent or paranoid the leaders of Iran might seem to western eyes." [0]
As for the OP's question... it was a dictatorship for 40 years driven not by good governance but by oil money. You either have a dictatorship that builds very strong institutions for a post-dictator rule, or you don't. And particularly the oil-dependent states forgo building the right institutions, because an oil-rich country doesn't need them. Without institutions and civil society a dictatorship erupts into chaos after the dictator dies, particularly if it happens abruptly.
In terms of institutions and governance Libya was far from the jewel of Africa. It was never designed to last. It's more akin to someone living on creditcard debt for a few years before it all comes crashing down.
[0] https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2011/nov/17/iran-w...
North Korea has survived until now not because they recently got nukes, but because they are holding South Korea hostage. The moment foreign troops near Pyongyang, conventional NK artillery would have leveled Seoul completely. Millions of rich-country people in a nation allied to the US would die. Also China would have been pissed.
An aside: I was listening to a Rick Steves (American celebrity traveler) presentation on the radio the other day. He was getting too preachy and just as I was about to change the channel he recounted a story about a trip to Iran. They were stuck in traffic in sweltering heat and the driver says "death to traffic". This caught Rick off guard and he inquired further.
Long story short, "death to FOO" is apparently an idiomatic phrase in Iran, especially in a political context, going back to the early 20th century. From http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=31116
It's similar to how English speakers might say, "damn Iran". Such an utterance doesn't imply that one wishes all Iranians to burn in Hell for eternity.I mention this because in American English "destroy" is a very strong literal term unless there's obvious sarcasm. Going back and parsing several infamous Iranian statements (official, or made by leaders)--"death to", "wiping Israel off the map", etc--I think it's fair to say that one could reasonably construe those statements as deliberately worded to refer to the Israeli political state. Of course, what Iran has said and what it has done (e.g. support terrorism) are quite different things. And destroying the political state vs the population is arguably a distinction without a difference as a practical matter. But in as much as Americans and Israelis believe that because of the seemingly common, blunt language that Iranians en mass wish to see the U.S. and even Israel literally destroyed, I think there's some unfair, possibly willful misinterpretation.
Ukrainian nukes were not theirs to begin with. NATO was as interested in keeping the nuclear club to a minimum as well as Russia.
By that reason they were nobody's nukes. Ukraine was a successor state of the USSR, and operational control of the weapons was a technological matter, not a political matter. The weapons delivery systems (missiles and heavy bombers) were located in Ukraine, as were the development and production chains.
In other words, the actual people who built the missiles would simply swap out an electronic control component to acquire operation control of the devices. These are the same people who voted >90% for Ukrainian independence and who distrusted the other large USSR successor state, Russia.
Also Libya's economy was very dependent on a small number of energy resources. Which very often drives a lot of problems for a country
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Resource_curse
I'm hopeful for Ethiopia that their economy being much more diverse (especially once the hydroelectric dam comes online), their economy will prove more resiliant
Sing it along with me:
If you are told the percentage increase, check the absolute increase;
Aaaaand if you are told the absolute increase, check the percentage increase!
Yes, our newborn was our fastest growing child for a long time! In fact, his growth outpaced all other children we knew going all the way back until the previous child was born. Adjusted for "inflation" though, I'm told it was only average growth.
relevant, as always: https://xkcd.com/1102/
And if you're told something "increased by 150%", for example, make sure it really is 150% and not just 50%.
Generally speaking, you'll want to present both. "From 6th to 7th grade, I went from 200 cm to 205 cm in height, a 2.5% increase." Otherwise, as you say, people will ask for N= or for %, or even starting asking for median IQR and statistical tests of difference. I do tire of oversimplistic analyses in popular media which present whichever one of the above measures is most in line with their narrative.
That's a very tall 12 year old!
It could be the GP is just very slow and was still in 6th grade as a 16 year old :)
Ethiopia is an interesting place. You can smell the money in the air.
"Ethiopia hailed as 'African lion' with fastest creation of millionaires" https://www.theguardian.com/world/2013/dec/04/ethiopia-faste...
Ethiopia is not an easy place to travel. People are friendly but reserved. English it not very common there. They are not the African "buddy" type of people (ey man, lets have a beer!). If you are into adventure, go to the Bale mountains and take a three day horse ride expedition and try to see the Ethiopian fox. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethiopian_wolf Or take a two week expedition on horsed to see the Ethiopian lions (unfortunately longer that my ass can sustain on a horse). AFAIK the only lions that live in the jungle. It is a rough place. I like it. Possibly love it, but Ethiopia is not for everyone.
Addis has two major museums. If you want to see Lucy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_(Australopithecus) make sure you go to the right one.
If anyone is interested in importing ore, please ask me. My Ethiopian friends are always nagging me for business contacts.
> They are not the African "buddy" type of people (ey man, lets have a beer!).
I think you're confusing Africans with Jamaicans or some other black stereotype.
I don't care about what you think about "black stereotypes".
But try to see the difference between welcoming Uganda (based on a statistic they are the most welcoming nation to foreigners) and Ethiopians. Yet, they are nearly neighbors.
I don't dislike that the Ethiopians are reserved. What did one of the rangers tell me? We are dirty. We don't have showers. We don't have washing machines. We are dirty. But we know that we are dirty. We are dirty but not stupid!
A 20 year expat (speak, before the Ethiopia hype( told me this joke:
How to shoot an Ethiopian? Aim 1 meter above his hear. You have to hit his ego!
Yes, they are a special kind of people and they take proud in it. If they ever throw me out of my current home, Ethiopia may be, besides Colombia, my second destination. It is happening there!
As a regular traveler, you really got my attention. Mind sharing some of your thoughts about Columbia too?
Colombia caught my attention when I lived in the states. But before I come to Colombia, lets talk about Brazil.
I fell in love with Brazil many years ago. Many people did, some may still do. It was an amazing place. People were super friendly, the women were curious about foreigners... Today Brazil is much less welcoming for foreigners, even slightly xenophobic. They still have an economic crisis and I wonder what will happen if the world economy cools down. It also has become dangerous again. People change, countries change, I may have changed.
So this brings us to Colombia. It is very cheap to fly there from the states. I had many adventures there, got certified in scuba diving, slept on a tiny house on an island when scuba diving, learned horse riding in Saint Augustin, got lost in the mountains when hiking near Armenia (visit Salento!). Partied super hard at night in Medellin, Cali and Bogota. People were super friendly, approaching me and other travelers and telling us how happy they are the things have changed in Colombia and foreigners are now visiting. The climate is super interesting since you are near the equator but also have the Andean mountains. You basically can get every temperature you want. From hot Caribbean (and overrated) Cartagena, to the city of eternal spring, Medellin, to cold Bogota. I love the Candelaria district in Bogota (as I once loved Santa Teresa in Rio). It is a magic place and brings me happiness.
People change, countries change, and I may change again. What worries me about Colombia is that more and more foreigners are coming (voted as number ?. tourist destination last year). This is seldom a good thing. Sooner or later the place will change and people will get fed up with tourists. SO if you want to visit, better visit now and not in 10 years.
Literature, there is not only 100 years of solitude, try to appreciate Nicolás Gómez Dávila.
'Confusing Africans'
What? You reaching man. There are a lot of cultural stereotypes from different African countries, just like how Americans see Germans as 'cold and reserved' and Italians as 'loud and friendly'.