Authoritarianism Goes Global (II) Anne Applebaum Douglas Rutzen Peter Pomerantsev Anne-Marie Brady

October 2015, Volume 26, Number 4 $14.00 Authoritarianism Goes Global (II) Anne Applebaum Douglas Rutzen Peter Pomerantsev Anne-Marie Brady The Rise of the World’s Poorest Countries Steven Radelet Decentralizing for a Deeper Democracy Jean-Paul Faguet, Ashley M. Fox, and Caroline Pöschl Rut Diamint on the New Militarism in Latin America Richard Youngs on “Non-Western Democracy” Alina Mungiu-Pippidi on Political Order and Political Decay After the Arab Spring Michele Dunne Charles Kurzman and Didem Türko¢glu Marc Lynch Kasper Ly Netterstrøm Michael Robbins Mieczys³aw Boduszyñski, Kristin Fabbe, and Christopher Lamont Radelet.NEW saved by HC on 4/10/15; 6,519 words including notes. Saved as TXT by TB on 6/23/15. 6,530 words. MP edits added by TB on 7/14/15; 6,542 words. AAS saved from author email by TB on 7/20/15; 6,559 words. FIN saved from AAS by TB on 7/20/15; 6,473 words. PGS created by BK on 7/27/15. THE RISE OF THE WORLD’S POOREST COUNTRIES Steven Radelet Steven Radelet holds the Donald F. McHenry Chair in Global Human Development at the Edmund A. Walsh School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. He is the author of Emerging Africa: How 17 Countries Are Leading the Way (2010). This essay is based on his forthcoming book, The Great Surge: The Ascent of the Developing World. For more than two decades now, the majority of the world’s poorest countries have been making some of the fastest and biggest development gains in history. The momentous progress achieved since the early 1990s is unprecedented. One-billion people have been lifted out of extreme poverty, the child death rate has been cut in half, life expectancy has increased significantly, millions more girls are enrolled in school, deaths in civil wars have dropped by three-quarters, average incomes have almost doubled, food production has increased by half, and democracy has spread like never before in the world’s poorest countries, notwithstanding with many setbacks, obstacles, and imper- fections along the way. Some of these gains—especially the declines in poverty and child mortality—rank among the greatest achievements in human history. Yet few people are aware that this progress is even happening. Most people believe that, apart from a few special cases such as China and India, developing countries by and large remain hopelessly mired in poverty, stagnation, and dictatorship. In reality, a major transformation has been quietly underway. It began in the 1960s and 1970s in a small handful of primarily East Asian countries, along with a few others such as Botswana and Mauritius. China’s re-emergence, which began in 1980, changed history. But the wider surge of progress really took off in the late 1980s and early 1990s, when dozens of developing countries around the world began to make gains, including Bangladesh, Brazil, Bulgaria, Chile, Costa Rica, the Journal of Democracy Volume 26, Number 4 October 2015 © 2015 National Endowment for Democracy and Johns Hopkins University Press 6 Journal of Democracy Dominican Republic, Ghana, Hungary, India, Moldova, Mongolia, Mo- zambique, the Philippines, Senegal, Tunisia, Turkey, and many more. Some of these countries are advancing quickly; others are moving at a more moderate pace, but still rapidly enough to achieve substantial progress in raising incomes, improving health, and reducing poverty. Not all developing countries are making progress, however. The Cen- tral African Republic, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Haiti, North Korea, and Uzbekistan, among others, are making little progress. War, while far less common, still rages in Afghanistan, South Sudan, Syria, and beyond. In some countries, there is growing cause for concern about eco- nomic slowdown and democratic backsliding or reversal. But the number of countries lagging behind is shrinking, and stagnation is the exception rather than the rule. The larger reality, often missed, is that the majority of developing countries are far healthier, wealthier, and better governed than they were 25 years ago. What happened? What spurred this surge of progress? And can it continue and spread further in the decades to come? Six Dimensions of Development Progress The depth and breadth of the unfolding development transformation can be seen by exploring the changes in six key areas: poverty, health, education, income, democracy, and war. 1) There has been an enormous decline in global poverty. Through- out human history, the number of people living in extreme poverty has grown steadily alongside the growth of the overall population. Two- hundred years ago, almost everyone was poor. Following the Industrial Revolution, the share of people living in poverty began to fall, but the total number continued to rise. By 1993, about two-billion people— equivalent to about 42 percent of the population of the developing world—lived on less than $1.25 a day (the World Bank’s definition of “extreme” poverty, with all figures using a consistent, inflation-adjusted measure).1 But at that point, the number of people living in extreme poverty, which had been rising since the beginning of human history, began to fall. And it fell really fast. By 2011, the number of people living in extreme poverty had dropped to just over one billion, or 17 percent of the population of developing countries. In just eighteen years, the number of extremely poor people decreased by half. China, of course, is a big part of the story. But the real surprise is that, excluding China, the number of people living in extreme poverty has decreased by 400 million, and continues to drop in dozens of countries around the world. Since the early 1980s, a total of 81 developing countries have reached the historic turning point at which their total number of extreme poor began to decline, despite continued population growth. For the first time ever, poverty reduction is a widespread, if not yet universal, phenomenon. Steven Radelet 7 2) There have been huge improvements in health. These gains start- ed earlier (in the 1960s) and have been even more far-reaching. In 1960, some 22 percent of children in developing countries died before their fifth birthday. By 1990, that rate had fallen to 10 percent, and in 2013 it was below 5 percent. This means that out of every hundred children born in developing countries, seventeen more survive today than would have in 1960. Life expectancy at birth has increased from 50 years in 1960 to 65 years today. Between 2000 and 2013, malaria mortality declined by 47 percent, and tuberculosis deaths fell by 33 percent. AIDS-related deaths dropped from 2.4 million in 2005 to 1.5 million in 2013, a decline of nearly a third in just eight years. In the early 1990s, diarrhea killed five-million children a year; today that number is just 760,000. One of the most remarkable aspects of the improvements in health is how widespread they have been. Even in the most poorly governed countries run by dictators, most major health indicators have improved. Consider this extraordinary fact: Since 1980, the child-mortality rate has decreased in every single developing country in the world for which data are available. There are no exceptions.2 3) Far more children, especially girls, are receiving formal education. The share of children enrolled in school jumped from 72 percent in the late 1980s to more than 87 percent today. In 1999, there were 106 million primary-school-aged children not attending school; by 2008, that number was down to 68 million. In the span of just a decade, forty- million more children were going to school. Schooling for girls has increased the most: In 1980, just half of all girls in developing countries completed primary school; today four out of five do so. In 1970, adults in developing countries had completed an average of only 3.4 years of schooling; by 2010, that number had more than doubled to 7.1 years.3 To be clear, the quality of education remains a serious concern, and more years of schooling do not always result in greater skills and knowl- edge. Thus the main educational focus in developing countries is now shifting from increasing access to improving quality. Still, the change has already been significant, and it is beginning to translate into increased capacity and skill among workers. 4) Incomes are growing steadily in most countries. Between 1977 and 1994, real GDP growth per person across all developing countries was zero. Beginning in the mid-1990s, however, the average rate of growth jumped to 3 percent per person per year. That rate may not sound impressive, but sustained over more than two decades, this seemingly modest growth has brought massive improvements: On a population- weighted basis, average incomes in developing countries (excluding China) have increased by 90 percent since the mid-1990s. Moreover, this acceleration in income growth has steadily expanded geographi- cally. Between 1977 and 1994, only 21 of 109 developing countries with populations greater than one million4 achieved the moderate standard of 8 Journal of Democracy 2 percent annual per capita growth; between 1995 and 2013, however, 71 countries reached that mark. Falling incomes also are much less common today: In the earlier period, 51 countries—nearly half of all developing nations—recorded negative growth; since then, that number has dropped to just ten. 5) Dozens of countries have become democracies. In 1983, only seventeen developing countries were democracies; by 2013, that number had tripled to 56 (and this figure excludes many other countries with populations under a million, which I do not count here).5 Until the 1980s, most developing countries were run by dictators on the far left or far right with little accountability.

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