If we pull out Japan, Israel, and postwar European catch-up, and do per capita growth, B.R. Shenoy’s list of top performers looks like this:
Jamaica, 6.9%
Trinidad and Tobago, 5.9%
Algeria, 5.7%
Puerto Rico, 5.5%
Rhodesia and Nysaaland, 4.1%
Turkey, 2.9%
Philippines, 2.5%
If you do absolute rather than per capita, many of those numbers go up by a few percentage points, for instance the Philippines becomes 5.8% and Algeria becomes 8.0%.
Those numbers are from B.R. Shenoy’s book Indian Economic Policy. Are there lessons? One is that parts of the Caribbean are in fact wealthier than many people think. Another is that the 1950s were a very good decade for the Caribbean, culturally too. A third lesson is that the top performers in one period may not have legs. Finally, looking at this table makes one realize, yet again, how good it was to more or less rid the world of communism.
The elephant in the room for this post is obvious: The top 5 were either colonies, part of a Western country or ruled by a Western elite.
Very true but… context! French Algeria was probably quite strong for a reason. As for the other 4, they were not exactly strategic for their Western motherlands, and probably just mostly ignored until then. Easy to get a good growth rate when you start very low.
Well then, you’ll show us the figures for the African colonies to justify your mood-affiliation with nostalgic Eurocentric jingoism.
Tyler, you really never could’ve become a Historian due to sloppy thinking. The data you put forward is not contextualised and doesn’t support your reading even without taking context into account. Frankly what does Communism have to do any of this? Was Jamaica Communist? Trinidad and Tobago? Puerto Rico? Rhodesia/Nyasaland? Turkey? Algeria was, but kicking out the French and political cleansing comes first in order of precedence, doesn’t it?
Count me in as another who can’t see the connection. Going by those examples, one could conclude that countries with names consisting of three or more syllables do well. Even allowing for Turkey, my theory is confimed by a higher percentage of examples than are used to justify most ideologies.
You guys are just silly. Communism kept a lot of potential contenders out of serious competition…
Mood affiliation.
Tyler – Your statement doesn’t even make any sense in the context of the fifties, which was actually a decade of fairly high growth in the Soviet Union.
http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/economics/staff/academic/harrison/public/eas93.pdf
Gimme a break. I’m sure the Communist countries were just not included due to the extreme difficulty of computing GDP for most of them. Possibly either intellectual laziness or intellectual dishonesty from part of B.R. Shenoy. By the way, if I am to believe Western data (vs. much higher official rates) for the USSR in http://www.econ.washington.edu/user/thornj/easterly_soviet_decline.pdf, the Soviet Union would top your list with 6.2% average growth in 1950–1959 for industrial production and 5.8% for extractive industries (computing services in GDP in a truly Communist state would be a joke). @ Sergey Kudarov mentioned some similar figures for China so…
A couple of lessons here imho. (1) Context has to be taken into account, including in relation to possible data vaccuums. (2) Short-term data is useful for short-term thinking, not serious economic demonstrations. (3) Partisan thinking shouldn’t interfere with a more interesting reality (that’s my take-away from Communism by the way).
Disclaimer: I’ve defended the 10-year purely GDP-related outcomes of several Communist countries in the 1950s but no one would deny that the 50-year prospects for GDP growth in becoming a Communist nation are pretty low.
(On a personal note, I am very curious about the very long run of some particulars however. I’m pretty sure Cuba in 50 years will be in a much more enviable position than each and every island in the Carribean, including Puerto Rico, and its alternate history alternative, due to high intellectual capital brought about by high-quality Communism – compared to the Vietnamese/Lao/Cambodian/North-Korean varieties.)
“I’m pretty sure Cuba in 50 years will be in a much more enviable position than each and every island in the Carribean, including Puerto Rico, and its alternate history alternative, due to high intellectual capital brought about by high-quality Communism – compared to the Vietnamese/Lao/Cambodian/North-Korean varieties”
All the smart Cubans have already moved to Miami.
It’s smart to choose fifty years, because that way most of your critics will be dead by the time your implicit support for the Castro regime is disproved.
Definitely a bet I’d take, after hammering out the specific islands, were I not going to be dead at that point.
You excluded the most prominent communist countries from the sample by definition:
“If we pull out…postwar European catch-up”
True, but not allowing for World War II in the calculations would be a huge mistake too.
Let’s just conclude that data from the 1950s is too messed up to conclude much at all.
The Caribbean is, as you say, wealthy relative to its demographics (with the exceptions of Cuba and Haiti). My theory is that the ratio of coastline to area is a decent predictor of wealth in the tropics. Thus, the smaller islands tend to be richer than bigger islands, that have more inland peasant farmers. By the way, Cuba, being extremely long relative to its width, has a lot of coastline, so it ought to get much richer someday, and probably pretty soon.
Indonesia is quite a bit poorer than Malaysia today, and the richest parts of Indonesia are not the elaborately isolated islands. I think what the farmers engage in matters. Certain kinds of agriculture are better than others. The Land Reform political dance only halts starvation temporarily, it doesn’t aid long-term growth much.
@Steve Sailer
Could it be that small islands are the best and the worst?
Smallest islands have the highest variances and get over-represented at both extremes.
I know if I were designing a planet, I’d put in lots more islands than Earth currently has.
so how good was to get rid of communism in 50s?
If you recall a modernization theory was created just in late 50s by Rostow, who feared progress of communist states.
btw China, though it had awful things like great leap forward and cultural revolution and devastating earthquake, scored averaged 5% growth till death of Mao, still China has a communist party as it’s lead as of today and has 8%+ growth after death of Mao.
so could you clarify you idea about getting rid of communism as a good thing from this table ? I cannot see it as a straight conclusion.
Most of the GDP growth was vastly inflated in communist countries. Don’t forget that if we were to believe American economics textbooks from the time, we heard every 20 years that the Soviet Union GDP was growing vastly faster than American GDP, even though the Soviet Union to American GDP ration remained constant.
The communism connection is that the communist countries are not on this chart, because their per-capita growth rates were poor.
so according to http://www.anz.com/business/info_centre/economic_commentary/iccbechinaindia.pdf – per person growth in china in 50s is 4.4% and China is excluded, then outside Europe and Asia there were not much ‘communist’ states in 50s.
Ya except in the 50s the Soviet Union was growing at ~6%.
Better try luck next time, tovarish.
I don’t quite get the point of pulling out Japan, Israel and the European post-WWII catchup. It has the feeling of lopping off all the countries that were doing really well. Was the category dropped one of “Rich people repeating what they’d done before”? (be that rebuilding after WWII or starting over in a new country aka Israel)
Yup.
How did California look on that measure? Or Hawaii, or many of the fastest growing MSAs of the 50s?
USSR may not have been sustainable, but to pretend the 1950s were anything but fantastic for them is silly. I’m not a fan of communism but I can admit high real GDP for USSR in 50s.
FYI: Output gap in China and USSR must have been enormous !
Algeria at 5.7%? Considering that Algeria was at war from 1954 to 1962, then a one-party authoritarian state for a couple of decades, then more civil war in the 90s, that is really amazing.
Didn’t they discover and exploit a lot of oil there in the 1950s?
That’s right, oil and/or natural gas? That explains it. Most of the exploiting probably came after the French and the Algerians stopped blowing each other up, though.
Yeah, can’t be oil (and not gas either, they torched it back then).
Hassi Messaoud was first exploited commercially in 1958, too late to have had an effect on average growth during the decade.
Algeria’s growth story during the 1950s seems surprising. I know of French propaganda from back then, about soldiers coming to the country for “development” but always took this as ridiculous.
Brazil’s rate of GDP per capita growth was ca. 4.0% in the 1950′s. Total GDP growth was around 7.0 – 7.5%. And Brazil was an order of magnitude larger than most of these countries.
The growth leader from 1950 to 1980 was Japan but the second growth leader was Brazil, whose rate of growth averaged 7% a year from 1950 to 1980.
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