CIAO DATE: 06/01

Catch-Up: Why Poor Countries Are Becoming Richer, Democratic, Increasingly Peaceable, and Sometimes More Dangerous

My interest in the developing countries, and some consequences of their catching up with the advanced ones, has several origins. One is experiences in government, at the RAND Corporation and at Stanford's Graduate School of Business, experiences that brought me into contact with people from many developing countries–or at least data and analyses about them. One of these was the Soviet Union, although it was not then widely regarded as underdeveloped. In the mid-1980s, Charles Wolf and I edited two books on the economy of the Soviet Union whose principal thesis was the advanced state of decay of that system. It was, to be sure, a pathological case but pathologies can be instructive.

The immediate cause of my work on the developing countries was Professor Samuel Huntington's book The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order. My immediate reaction was that most people in the future would be too rich to be engaged in "clashing." That was not an especially well informed opinion but it led to my investigating the current state of development economics and some of the known consequences of development. A profoundly important one of these is the connection, evidently a causal one, between economic and political development. If one accepts, as this monograph argues, that much of the world will become economically developed, then it seems to follow that it will become widely democratized as well. So I argued in "The Tide Beneath the 'Third Wave'" (Rowen, 1995). Of particular interest, because of its large and growing importance, is the political future of China; in "The Short March" (Rowen, 1996) I proposed that it is on a path to become a democracy in the not terribly distant future.

The material that follows could be deficient in at least two ways: one is that I undoubtedly have made errors both of omission and commission regarding the literature on development and only hope that they do not invalidate the central arguments. The other is that, despite an effort to anticipate events that could derail the path of progress, I might have missed something fundamental; but if this turns out to be true, so have many other people. I want to thank several former and current assistants for their help: Bruce Donald, George Wilson, Amy Searight, J.J. Lee, John Schafer, and Sue Hayashi.

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