Andrew Leonard on Botswana

Andrew Leonard in two posts speculates on Botswana's success. From the first postin 2006:
"A country the size of Texas with a population of 1.6 million, Botswana is no paradise. Inequality and unemployment are high, and AIDS is a nightmare. But in a continent of failed states, Botswana is a beacon. How did it do it? And can its example be copied?

There seems to be near universal agreement that good leadership and sound policy choices were critical to Botswana's success. The first president of Botswana, Seretse Khama, a tribal chieftain educated at Balliol College in the U.K., is widely credited with being a great leader. Taxation rates have historically been low and rule by law effective. The prudent use of revenues from Botswana's lucrative diamond mines to fund government expenditure was also crucial.

But the most interesting question is whether Khama and Botswana benefited from historically contingent forces related to colonialism that ended up giving the country a leg up. "An African Success Story: Botswana," by Daron Acemoglu, Simon Johnson and James Robinson (three economists, two from MIT and one from Harvard), argues that the Tswana tribes enjoyed pre-colonial institutions that encouraged cooperation, tolerated dissent, and in general provided solid support for the development of a mature civil society. Due to a unique set of historical circumstances, those institutions survived the colonial era.

The battle of Dimawe was part of that. But so was Sechele's subsequent plea to Britain to place his nation under its protection, as defense against the Boers. The British resisted for a few decades, then acceded when the German seizure of what later became Namibia threatened their imperial ambitions. But the British never paid much attention to the Protectorate of Bechuanaland. Distracted by the rest of their empire, convinced that there was nothing to be gained from direct exploitation, they left the Tswana essentially to themselves.
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Historical arguments that attempt to explain economic success (or failure) can rarely be settled, one way or another.
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But Botswana does offers a counter-example, a model for what can happen when good leaders make good decisions in an environment where traditional social structures survive intact in the face of Western imperial domination."

From the recent post:

"On March 20, the government of Botswana, the world's largest producer of raw diamonds, and the legendary diamond goliath De Beers announced the opening of the Diamond Trading Company, Botswana, a state-of-the-art processing center for cutting, polishing, marketing and selling diamonds.
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But even though there's some satisfaction to be taken in this post-colonial triumph, Botswana's success in gaining concessions from De Beers is no guarantee of economic prosperity. The diamond trade has not escaped the pressures of globalization. Once upon a time, Antwerp was the world's center of diamond polishing and cutting, but today India and China increasingly dominate the business, taking full advantage of their brutally competitive juxtaposition of low wages and highly skilled labor. De Beers no longer controls the entire global diamond trade -- upstart Russian and Israeli firms will seek every opportunity to undercut its prices."
According toWikipedia "With its proven record of good economic governance, Botswana was ranked as Africa's least corrupt country by Transparency International in 2004, ahead of many European and Asian countries. The World Economic Forum rates Botswana as one of the two most economically competitive nations in Africa. In 2004 Botswana was once again assigned "A" grade credit ratings by Moody's and Standard & Poor's. This ranks Botswana as by far the best credit risk in Africa and puts it on par with or above many countries in central Europe, East Asia, and Latin America." But "Botswana has been hit very hard by the AIDS epidemic; the average life expectancy in Botswana at birth, 1990: 64 years, 2005: 34 years. "