Oliver W. Kim
Everything, newest first — across every channel. Their profile →
Hiding
28 November 2025
29 July 2025
From one piece Indonesia Climbs the Chain 5 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Pollution is a price worth paying for escaping poverty only if the people breathing it are the ones who escape.Their words
It’s one thing if residents of Sulawesi like Mr. Jamal and his family have had to risk exposure to toxic pollutants in a successful escape from poverty. It’s another thing entirely if those bearing most of the burden see few of the benefits.
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Their words
Morowali’s poverty rate has seen a modest decline since 2016, from around 15% to 12%, but this puts it squarely in the middle of the pack of other Sulawesi districts—and not far from the decline in the national average, which fell from 10.9% to 8.6% over the same period.
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Their words
Poverty reduction is never a purely technocratic exercise, and questions about industrial policy can never be entirely divorced from those of political economy—including those of global geopolitics.
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korrents.com
Industrial policy that grows a poor country’s economy does not automatically reduce its poverty.Their words
But, peering past the hype around Morowali reminds us that we should be careful before assuming that industrial policy must be pro-poor.
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Their words
In our world, we know of no escape from poverty other than climbing the value chain.
12 February 2025
From one piece A World Without Aid? 7 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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korrents.com
Aid to African states has been large enough to warp their politics and too small to transform their economies.Their words
As scholars like Nicolas van de Walle have pointed out, aid can also foster an unhealthy dependency—in his coinage, many African states live in a state of “permanent crisis”, where aid is large enough to reshape (and warp) the political economy around it, but not large enough to be fundamentally transform countries’ economies.
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korrents.com
Aid transforms a country only where a capable state with a development plan is already there to spend it.Their words
All this to say: capable states with ambitious developmental plans, when hit with a bazooka of money, can seize the opportunity to transform themselves.
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Their words
The potential end of USAID is an unfolding public health and humanitarian disaster, but it does not permanently doom the task of growth—in large part because these aid flows were far too small to begin with.
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Their words
American aid obligations in Sub-Saharan Africa, for instance, have never exceeded $15 per person
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Their words
The longevity of that consensus is itself remarkable: in 79 years of data, Republican presidents spent an average of $34 billion a year on aid, while Democrats spent $40 billion.
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korrents.com
American aid spending has been flat in real terms since 1945 even as the American economy grew tenfold.Their words
Even as GDP has grown tenfold, US aid budgets have remained basically flat in real terms—the result (one might guess) of a delicate balancing act between bipartisan consensus among elites and a wariness of attracting too much negative attention.
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Their words
For people like me working on global development in the West, the bitter pill to swallow is that aid is not development.
21 January 2025
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On changing their mind
Having fallen into the East Asia - Africa Trap before, I can tell you precisely why so many people make this mistake.
From one piece No, South Korea Was Not Poorer Than Kenya in 1960 7 beliefs, in the piece's order there
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Their words
African states formed where it was rational to do so, in places like the Ethiopian highlands where population density was high and the disease burden was relatively low.
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korrents.com
Pre-colonial statehood in East Asia carried through the colonial period and on into the post-independence era.Their words
Precisely how much the ancient continuity of East Asian states matters for development is still a little murky, and the delineation with colonial legacies is still an area of active debate—but the balance of evidence suggests that the legacies of these pre-colonial states stretched through the colonial period, extending even into the post-independence era.
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Their words
The relative absence of pre-colonial states meant that the newly independent African states were largely European inventions; modern Kenya, for instance, inherits the boundaries of British East Africa, which was created by pulling together the Kikuyu, Luo, Luhya, Kalenjin, and Kamba ethnic groups.
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Their words
The fact remains that without a stock of capable administrators, industrial policy and export targeting and infrastructure-building—or even Adam Smith’s minimum of “peace, easy taxes, and a tolerable administration of justice”—are a nonstarter.
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korrents.com
Japanese colonial rule built a far deeper state in Korea than European rule ever built in sub-Saharan Africa.Their words
The Japanese empire reached far deeper into its colonies than any European empire ever did in Sub-Saharan Africa.
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Their words
At independence, South Korea and Taiwan had far higher rates of primary education than most of Sub-Saharan Africa.
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Their words
Catch-up growth in the 20th century was almost entirely state-led.
9 March 2023
22 September 2022
7 April 2021
26 July 2019
7 February 2019
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