"So Zambia is not failed. It is simply very, very poor. Sixty-four percent of the population lives on less than $1 per day" And that is the key fact. Many of t

"So Zambia is not failed. It is simply very, very poor. Sixty-four percent of the population lives on less than $1 per day" And that is the key fact. Many of the comments in this thread are not specific to Zambia. There was a time when Zambia looked like a success story among African countries, as the first national leader after independence seemed more democratically minded and less corrupt than many leaders in Africa. The year Zambia became independent, I have read, it was wealthier than Taiwan--where my wife was living at the time. Zambia was neither unusually poor nor unusually badly governed among countries of the world when it gained independence. So the key question in looking at international examples of national development is to slog through the process of John Stuart Mill's "method of agreement and difference"[1] and figure out what commonalities help countries develop and prosper, and what commonalities drag down the fortunes of the inhabitants of a country. "Ninety-four percent of the land in Zambia is customary or traditional, no one has a title to it. It’s not just sitting there, people are living on it, farming, grazing animals, it’s just technically under the control of a chief." That jumps out at me as a huge difference between Zambia and many countries that have developed more successfully--clear land title that can be readily transferred for money. Taiwan makes better use of its land, and developed better, I hypothesis, in part because it is clear who owns what land and who has rights in land. (There was land reform for poor peasants, making them landowners, in Taiwan in the 1950s. Then the economic development began there.) [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill's_Methods#Joint_method_of_agreement_and_difference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mill's_Methods#Joint_method_of... AFTER EDIT: I posted hurriedly at first, having an appointment to get to. One other point, which generalizes to more parts of Africa and more parts of east Asia, is that for a given level of educational spending, many east Asian countries invested mostly in good-quality primary education for the masses, while many African countries set up a national university available only to an elite minority of the population. (And often enough, the national university graduates from African countries became part of the "brain drain" to other countries.) Raising the skill level of the masses diversifies the economy and makes even countries with very limited natural resources--of which Japan and Taiwan are noteworthy examples--able to develop through trade and transition from an agricultural economy to an industrial economy and then to a postindustrial economy. Few African countries have pursued a national education policy of broad primary education, those that have are among the African countries that are faring best.