> It ranks 107th out of 180 on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, which is middling, but not especially bad, roughly comparable to Indonesia and Brazil.
I would still guess corruption is a major reason. Sometimes the way it’s measured and how it’s reported is not accurate. People internalize corrupt practices as normal and stop viewing it as corruption. A bribe is a gift, a nepotistic appointment is “taking care of one’s family”.
It also doesn’t always make sense to compare only corruption with other countries. Some may be more corrupt but they have enough positive factors that they develop better despite the corruption.
The Tranparency International's index is a horrible measure.
It's more dependent on the press reporting corruption than of any other factor, for the extent that it measures anything real it focuses exclusively on small scale corruption, and it incredibly biased by cultural factors.
It's a mistake to use it to compare one country with another, and it's a mistake to use it to spot trends in a single place. AFAIK, it's a mistake to use it.
Does anyone even give them credibility in the first place…?
Such an exceedingly complex thing just seems improbable to take at face value, without an enormous amount of proof and well reasoned methodology backing it up.
It is notoriously difficult to gather accurate quantitative data on illegal or unethical activities. And the weightings in the index are rather arbitrary.
Countries trying to become uncorrupt generally go way down because they can start reporting on found corruption. This means people care and so it is worth reporting.
That’s also a possibility. I was mainly thinking where it’s so embedded it’s not even perceived as corruption anymore.
But yeah, what you’re saying is also done. Usually something like an anti-corruption ministry is created. Their job is to find and prosecute corruption. Guess what the most “lucrative “ and cushiest jobs are now - that’s right, the anti corruption ministry itself. Anyone doing business now has to bribe them too in addition to whoever they bribed before. And corruption goes “down” officially, and it looks good on international external metrics.
As the article states, that Malawi hasn't developed much industry or exports is more of a description of poverty than an explanation. Malawi can grow coffee, but mostly doesn't. They have rare earth element deposits, but little mining. Why haven't they developed more?
When you consider places that do have significant mining, it isn't like that investment is exclusively home grown. Often what happens is it comes from external capital seeking permissive governments willing to give claims to these natural resources to these external companies to make a profit off of.
The fact that there is little mining of the natural resources in Malawi paints a picture of a government that might be less influenced by foreign money than others in the global south, moreso than any statement on poverty.
Could it be that they haven't been so infected by the money bug that for now they still have a society oriented around happiness and maintaining traditional ways of life rather than economic attainment?
I live in South Africa and my gardener happens to be Malawian, as was a gardener my parents had when I was growing up.
They’re both good people with pride in their work, but they are from poverty and have little in the way of skills except for manual labour jobs.
They came to South Africa, like so many from nearby countries, as our significantly more developed economy offers far better earning opportunity.
Not relevant to your comment, but want to also mention this creates xenophobic tension with the section of the local population which is in poverty as they feel their jobs are stolen. While there are certainly cases where people illegally employ immigrants to pay them less than locals, in cases where pay is at least equal, Zimbabweans and Malawians tend to have reputation of being more honest and hard working than the indigenous population.
We have Nigerians come here too and by contrast they tend to be super scetchy.
I don't know why Malawi is poor but I was struck by how easily this comment can be paraphrased to describe somewhere thousands of miles distant.
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I live in North Texas and my gardener happens to be Mexican, as was a gardener my parents had when I was growing up.
They’re both good people with pride in their work, but they are from poverty and have little in the way of skills except for manual labor jobs.
They came to North Texas, like so many from nearby countries, as our significantly more developed economy offers far better earning opportunity.
Not relevant to your comment, but want to also mention this creates xenophobic tension with the section of the local population which is in poverty as they feel their jobs are stolen. While there are certainly cases where people illegally employ immigrants to pay them less than locals, in cases where pay is at least equal, Hondurans and Mexicans tend to have reputation of being more honest and hard working than the indigenous population.
We have Floridians come here too and by contrast they tend to be super sketchy.
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I read your original comment and was struck by how well it fits the situation here in Texas. You could've made the same comment about South Africa 40 years ago and it would still translate to the situation in Texas.
I don't know how you feel about people coming to South Africa for a shot at a better life but have to say that I have the highest respect for those men and women who have left their homes and families across the border for an uncertain future here in the US despite knowing that it is quite true that in many jobs they will be paid less than locals who do less actual work. All of this while being gamed by employers who know that they are illegally in the country and who work closely with Immigration Officials to identify people who can be quickly rounded up and sent south to pad some politician's resume or to distract the public from some other more significant issue. The employers never suffer consequences though they are the ones who created the opportunity and actively assisted in concealing immigration status for many of the workers.
It is a complex issue that should be solvable but as long as there are powerless people to heap the blame on we will probably see this continue.
Yes, I was thinking as I wrote it that there are likely parallels to places in US.
And yes, it’s a complex issue for sure.
I’m convinced that the way out of poverty here is through education and sadly there is just a huge amount of apathy (when not corruption)
at all levels here by the people who are supposed to be making it happen, from pupils, their parents, teachers, etc, all the way to the minister of education.
Meanwhile people like me pay huge amounts of tax and still need to pay for private schooling for my kids, private security and medical aid.
Essentially, most of the money I pay for tax is a charity intended for the poor, but due to apathy/incompetence/corruption, not nearly enough of it gets used effectively.
Foreign aid is rarely a gift - in almost all cases it is a business transaction. It is given as a loan, or in return for some mineral rights, or for an important UN vote, or for allegiance in a war.
For the loan cases, the terms are often unaffordable, effectively handing effective control of the entire country to the entity who has the other end of the loan - it is the modern empire-by-debt.
The Rwanda case cannot be told without Paul Kagame, one of the rare authoritarians who is also a real nation-builder, analogous to Park Chung Hee (South Korea, 1960s-1970s). He locks up his opponents but also has leveraged aid to really help socioeconomic conditions. E.g., the very close and productive collaboration with Partners in Health/Paul Farmer.
Kagame cannot be compared to Park Chung Hee or LKY. Park's economic policies actually helped South Korea climb up the economic value chain, though a lot of that was also due to Japanese technology transfers to Korea in the 1960s-90s.
On the other hand, Kagame's execution on economic reform has been a failure when compared against Uganda, as Uganda [0] has a significantly more complex (ie. higher value) economy than Rwanda [1] despite also suffering a severe civil war in the 1990s and dealing with the Idi Amin's kleptocratic rule in the 1980s.
A lot of foreign aid is direct things like food, medicine, doctors, AIDS prevention programmes, vaccines for specific things, maternal care, containment of an Ebola epidemic, etc.
Do you really think that e.g. Kenya is voting alongside EU members because the EU paid for a part of a highway between two cities in Kenya?
Then yes, there are loans and grants for infrastructure things.
> For the loan cases, the terms are often unaffordable, effectively handing effective control of the entire country to the entity who has the other end of the loan - it is the modern empire-by-debt.
That's not true. The rates are very public, and while sometimes they are on the higher end, unaffordable is a stretch, and that's how loan rates work. It is inherently risky to give loans to a developing country with high corruption rates. That's why there are also lots of direct grants or direct physical aid with stuff instead of money.
The IMF also sometimes gives loans with strict requirements on market reforms, which can be controversial. Notably in the former Soviet/Warsaw pact bloc, economic shock therapy under instruction of the IMF had some devastating short term consequences, and in some countries led to mass dubious privtisations. In most though, it paid off and led to rapid and sustained economic and social growth.
For both, around half of GDP is in the services sector. It doesn't matter that much what raw resources they export when it's a smaller portion of GDP (23% in Rwanda, 15% in Malawi). Also, almost all of those raw resources that Rwanda exports are stolen from the DRC by Rwanda-backed militias.
Foreign aid, and Rwanda's ability to position itself geopolitically as a trusted stable partner (which enables more aid and for it to get away with theft and murder) have more impact than maize vs gold.
And in the end, there are plenty of countries that have successfully developed and become less or not poor without having anything of serious value to export. From Bangladesh to the Balkans (I mean post-decolonisation Balkans, not post-Iron Curtain - it was mostly an area with subsistence farming as the main employment, disease, low rates of literacy and very low for higher education, frequent conflict and ethnic/religious tensions, few natural resources other than grain and some very limited amounts coal/minerals). If anything, it usually is the opposite, cf. the resource curse.
"70% of Malawians live on less than $2.15 a day. Under the World Bank’s revised $3-a-day poverty line, it’s 75%."
This sounds like an extremely bimodal distribution -- a 40% increase in the cut-off line only captures 5% more of the population, so only a small number of people are in this "poor but survivable" zone, with most well under and some well over, I assume. Does this map to the usual rural/urban divide?
Rwanda has prospered for the past three decades while Malawi has floundered because Rwanda is run by an effective dictator engaging in developmentalist nation-building. Malawi has no equivalent power center, and certainly none with the beneficence to try and raise up their countrymen.
> The fertilizer subsidy program (FISP) consumes up to three-fourths the agriculture budget in some years to subsidize maize inputs for smallholders. It is politically untouchable because rural maize farmers are the median voter. Several administrations have made some attempt to reform it and backed down. Resources that could go to roads, irrigation, or diversification go to propping up the existing structure.
Idk, this one doesn't seem super difficult to diagnose. The political system has been captured by a special interest with consolidated control.
Special interests, yes. Consolidation–as in a unified interest group representing a commanding majority of the economy–no. At least none that aren’t similarly stagnating.
> “Malawi is poor because its agricultural productivity is low” is closer to a tautology than an answer.
I used to make the same error. Thing is in the natural sciences this looks like circular reasoning, but in the humanities quite commonly things just hang in thin air. Case in point, the banker looks at the poor farmer and denies credit because the guy doesn't have capital, and the farmer doesn't have capital because he can't get credit. Thing is, both sides understand that.
Even with this, a farm in Finland I'm guessing is probably far more productive with better equipment and increased investment in fertilizer, pesticide, and utilization of elite cultivars, which have increased western yields in many crops by several fold change over the past 70 or 80 years (corn shown in 1, yellow denotes "old agriculture", green denotes introduction of industrial fertilizer, blue denotes introduction of hybrid engineered cultivars).
But Finland obviously has other economic sectors to rely upon than mainly farming.
For those who don't "get it", it's output is not dismal, far from it LOL.
About 5M people, a fifth the population of Malawi, none the less are one of the top producers in the entire world for oats and barley. Not per capita... total. Wow. Note that only about 10% of the population farms which makes the ratio even crazier.
Finns as a whole somehow produce about 2x their entire countries body weight in barley per year which always freaks me out. The country is also one of the top 10, usually top 5, producers of oats in the entire world, and they're competing with giant countries like Canada and Russia. Giant Canada only produces about 3x as much oats as tiny Finland.
Finland climate isn't what you'd think of for tomatoes but they produce about three dozen tomatoes per capita every year, which is also weird to think about. Not just how do they grow that many tomatoes, but why? They like pasta sauce and pizza sauce that much?
However Finland is not massively wildly overpopulated with frequent famines like Malawi. Those conditions will annihilate a countries productivity, including ag productivity.
I'm left wondering what people in Malawi think about this. I have no idea whether they'd be better than this outside perspective at analysing the factors behind slow growth, but the comparison might be interesting regardless.
Perhaps there are cultural reasons that explain this, such as attitudes towards work, entrepreneurship, private ownership etc?
I have no idea if Rwanda and Malawi have difference there, but globally one can see clearly see the impact of culture. Just look at how well Japan did despite losing WW2 and having little natural resources, or how badly Russia has done despite its huge landmass and resources, because the political culture always seems to lead to really bad autocratic governance.
In my country (Finland) areas where Swedish speaking people are the majority do consistently better than neighbouring areas with Finnish speaking majority - lower unemployment, less health and social issues and so on. Some of that may be due to historical accumulation of wealth, but I'm convinced that mostly it's because of differences in cultural values and attitudes. Some studies indicate that the Swedish speakers tend to have better social life, which improves life outcomes in many ways.
More like: Rwanda has a competent dictator (and has had the same one for 26 years, more if you consider the years where he was the strongman behind the President). A competent dictator is better than an incompetent dictator -- or even, in many ways, an incompetent democracy.
Is Malawi an incompetent democracy? Based on the article it seems to have a functioning stable democracy.
Are you implying that a dictator would lead to Malawi becoming wealthy? Seems like a disturbing argument. If that’s not what you are implying then what are you implying?
Are you implying that a "functioning" democracy automatically leads to good decisions being made and crowd always has good wisdom regardless of the attributes of the crowd?
To lead a country to prosperity is as simple as letting a nation vote and counting their votes and then giving power to the guy they voted for?
I'll mention it here because it's tangentially related to your comment. The book "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families" about the Rwandan genocide and aftermath helped me understand the country and it's current state much better. The book has the added benefit of being from 1999 so has far fewer of the culture war components one would expect from a similar book released today.
This viewpoint never made sense to me, because you have variation within any culture, and because advantageous strategies win out over time, any culture will evolve. Therefore, it never made sense to me to consider culture a static immutable group of homogeneous people. To me it is pretty obvious that some systematic challenges must exist that keep what we consider to be successful strategies from succeeding in those environments.
Your examples of Russia and Japan are easily explained by geopolitics. Indeed, Japanese individuals don't tend to excel out of Japan while many Russians do.
And people define victory in different ways. Having many children is how some people define victory. Having no children and a diploma on the wall is how some people define victory.
I mean, is it beyond belief that many of them are OK with living a simple agrarian life? Or have very little opportunity to learn that there is any other way to live?
Makes you wonder if less public debt and less focus on growing cash crops to service that debt might actually make for a more comfortable 'simple agrarian life' overall. Even if this meant lower GDP.
I've often thought there's something wrong with the way we put a simple dollar figure on poverty. Less than $3 dollars a day with or without easy access to land, shelter, and fresh water?
In this community it is well beyond belief. It’s up there with UFOs and lizard people. Not extracting every. Last. Penny. From EVERYTHING no matter the impact. Anathema to a hardcore capitalist forum like this.
Immigrants to any country are a unique slice of the population because they chose to migrate for a better life. Hence immigrants in most countries tend to do well economically (sometimes after a generation). Uncertain that cultural differences are the reason for different economic outcomes you observe.
Swedish speakers in Finland are not immigrants anymore than Dutch speakers in Belgium are, though (the Dutch speaking area also generally does better than the French speaking areas, for a variety of reasons).
it is interesting to note that since the industrial revolution it was the french speaking part of belgium that flourished due to its steel industry, and the dutch speaking part was the poor one. only when the steel industry stopped being competitive the economy switched away from industry to service where the french part stagnated and the dutch part started to flourish,
so clearly who does better has nothing to do with the language but with the economy and who has the better resources and is more adaptable to serve the current needs.
There was significant repression on the Dutch language in Belgium not long ago. There was no Dutch university prior to 1930s and courts were solely in french for a long time.To this date there's still some Bruxellois who'll call you Sale Flamand (dirty Fleming) if you speak Dutch in the capital city. It is however way better now than 50+ years ago, my grandfather got beat up for speaking Dutch.
Saying language had no influence on who did better is inaccurate.
Malawi needs to drop tobacco as their main export. Tobacco is hard on the soil and requires more fertilizer and acidifies the soil. Swapping out tobacco for something like a specialty coffee would be far better (and Rwanda has done that) Bringing some hard specie with Coffee would really help and the foreign aid could help them make the transition, which would take a few years to get going.
> Malawi needs to drop tobacco as their main export
That's the product they have most comparative advantage in producing. You're literally suggesting they should cut their income down, and try to get better at something else.
Tobacco is a crop that is experiencing declining demand. Neighboring Rwanda has built up their coffee export business, and Malawi could too. And as I mentioned it’s less harsh on the soil which is and added benefit.
The Central African Republic, which has a low population density, lots of water and arable land is also very poor. As is South Sudan. It must be very hard to trade your way out of poverty if you are landlocked in a poor continent. All the countries in Europe are well off by world standards because there's an enormous market next-door.
The question isn't "why is Malawi poor compared to European countries", it's "why is Malawi poor compared to other countries in a similar – or worse – situation"
Look at the map in the article. It's a lot lighter in the middle than around the coastline. Niger, Chad, Burundi, South Sudan, CAR. These are all very poor. Malawi is not really an exception.
Merchant caravans are known from ancient times. If there was something valuable to sell, there likely would be a way to transport it to a nearest port (even if abroad) and still make a profit.
This was an interesting thread to read as a Malawian living right here in Malawi and frustrated about our situation. As the article mentions, we have a lot of things going for us that should have us in a better situation - very few natural disasters, no wars/civil unrest, even though the rains are sketchy sometimes we generally have good rainfall and even though we have challenges with food sometimes, it's rare to hear someone actually died of hunger.
However, there are a multitude of problems that have resulted in us being where we are. Now mind you, I am just a software engineer not a development expert (but for some credibility, I was the first engineer at Malawian owned Credit Reference Bureau and built most of the software there and I have worked with Social Cash Transfer program before as a consultant).
* Infrastructure is a big problem, we have poor road infrastructure, almost no rail or airline industry though those are picking up as of recent years. Very few Malawians have access to electricity, I believe some reports indicated less than 10%. Most of our population lives in rural areas. Internet penetration is growing but even cell tower coverage is not yet there - our TELCOS have about 3-4 million subscribers max, we are a population of about 20 million people (maybe 40% under 19?) and yet our largest bank only has about 2 or 3 million customers.
* We have low literacy rates and high dropout rates especially in rural areas. This is worrying for a population with almost half being youth/children. Our school infrastructure is also not that great, it is not strange to find a class of students learning under a tree in some rural and peri-urban areas.
* Corruption and mismanagement of funds - this is a big problem here. A lot of the money in the government programs and NGO/Donor programs finds it's way into individuals' pockets. Some of the initiatives are well meaning but because of corruption and pilfering of funds the impact isn't always felt at the level that's expected.
* Mismanagement of Natural resources - we have deposits of gold, rutile, uranium and other materials - we have companies from Australia/China and the likes setting up and possibly benefitting without giving much back to the country besides some veiled Corporate Social Responsibility activities, with parts of the funds going into people's pockets - we need to do better to control our resources but the low literacy rates and lack of awareness of some of these things affects how we as citizens react.
* There's lots online about our agriculture, so I won't spend too much time there - only to say we need to do better to mechanize and not rely too much on the rain cycles. I'm saying this as someone who has gotten into farming recently and is frustrated by how... manual it all is :)
There's a lot more I could say but I hope this give somewhat of a picture.
I should just mention, Malawians are some of the brightest most hardworking people you will ever meet but also trustworthy and loyal. You will probably meet a Malawian doctor in any part of the world and our software engineers are getting there too, we just need the exposure and opportunity to prove ourselves. I help moderate a community of developers and I can tell you we have talent and we do come cheap (even as low as $25/hr ;)
If you are ever in the market to try working with some Malawians, contact is on the profile :)
I honestly think the lack of education is a major issue. Malawi has a relatively low literacy rate compared with many other countries in Southern Africa.
I spent a while sitting in Malawi pondering that. A while ago but I don't think it's changed much. In many ways it's not a poor as you'd think from the GDP figures - most people have housing and enough food and the place is friendly and pleasant. I figured a lot is due to the exchange rate making things cheap because they don't have a good source of foreign income. The exports are mostly agricultural stuff that doesn't go for much money and the other obvious thing of tourism and holiday homes doesn't work well because the malaria is terrible there.
In fact I see the article doesn't mention malaria but most places you go they say oh yeah there were some cases a year ago twenty miles ago but in Nkhata Bay when I was there it was like a thousand cases in the village and a backpacker went the the loos the previous night and was found dead beside them in the morning.
> 'The unit of analysis for "why is X poor" may be the political coalition, not the country.'
So maybe the real question here is not about the absolute poverty, but the derivative: "Why hasn't Malawi seen meaningful growth for 30 years?" — And the answer could be surprisingly related to first-world countries like Finland that also have experienced decades of stunted growth.
Like Malawi, Finland has functional and stable multiparty politics. Like Malawi, Finland's politicians have spent decades locally optimizing for minor benefits towards their preferred flavor of the median voter (right wing cuts taxes a bit, left wing improves benefits a bit, nobody offers anything transformative).
Too much stability at the wrong time might be a slow curse.
Rwanda serves as the occident's proxy to extract minerals from the kivu soil, it has been occupying it since the end of the genocide on the pretence of pursuing the genocidal troops that fled there.
There is absolutely no surprise here, it's rich becaus it plunders the richest soil on earth.
Regarding Rwanda, I think we're forgetting that a large part of their success comes from their plundering of the Congo's resources, mineral and otherwise.
There have been two gigantic continent-wide wars over the Congo, for fuck's sake.
> Malawi has also long been a darling of donors. Malawi’s aid per capita in 2023 was roughly 2.5x the global average.
Maybe the population doesn't feel like it needs to be productive, if they're continuing to receive such generous largesses. Isn't that the goal of UBI for developed nations? People should be able to pursue their passions and not have to worry about the necessities of life?
Malawi is poor because there is no reason for it to grow above the normal growth rate. Countries usually find themselves in a high growth situation if they are at the cross-road of major trade or geopolitics (ie: Singapore, UAE, korea, Taiwan, etc.) Of course the opportunity has to be cultivated but it has to be there in the first place.
There isn't much in Africa especially in the part of Malawi. They are not even coastal (they are landlocked) which makes their situation even worse.
It's very strange what they don't discuss, especially when it seems to answer supposedly unanswerable questions.
I rooted around in wikipedia and Malawi has FAR more people than the land can support. They have a top down demand they must grow maize although the land and climate are very unsuited for maize. Why? Unsurprisingly they have had severe recent famines unlike Rwanda. If they had capacity they could survive a minor shortfall in rain but they have more people than the land can support so the famines are very rough. They have about 3x the agricultural land as Rwanda but its not suited to maize but its demanded they grow maize. Maize will only grow with massive fertilizer imports which they cannot afford and occasionally politically/economically manage to totally screw up, alongside Maize is traditionally dependent on very reliable rainfall or post industrial era advanced irrigation which they don't have.
I would estimate the geography of Rwanda will support about 20M people, luckily they have about 14M. They can coast thru some rough agricultural times and they've developed enough industry and trade that they can import their way thru short term minor local problems.
On the other hand Malawi can only support maybe 15M people reliably, unfortunately they have about 22M. When the rains don't come or the politicians screw up the fertilizer imports, they die.
Its very difficult for them to "advance" beyond subsistence ag without enough to feed everyone and ag policies seemingly intended to be self destructive.
I don't know why they "have to" grow maize despite it resulting in starvation. Historically this type of thing is caused by someone making a huge profit or attempting to maintain control. Regardless of cause, until they can eat, they will not advance.
After eating dinner tonight they can dig a mine or build a factory. Oh wait there is no dinner tonight. Well then. And so they remain very poor, permanently.
The country, as a plot of land, is quite wealthy. $22B is a lot of money. If they had, say, 3M people as a population they'd be in position to become the next Taiwan. Taiwan's GDP per capita was about there in the mid 80s before they really took off. But they have over 20M people probably 30M soon, so they'll live in poverty, permanently.
In Rwanda an unusually good harvest means a new mine can be opened and they will "permanently" be richer. In Malawi an unusually good harvest means the people who would have starved to death this year now won't starve to death until next year. There will be no permanent improvement of anything in Malawi.
This is a dumb take that highlights the common lack of experience with Africa that arises with anyone who writes about it - Malawi was always much poorer than the rest of East Africa as can be seen by the 1990 HDI [0].
Starting from a lower base as well as weak institutions, weak capital markets, and political instability during the transition to democracy lead Malawi to underperform.
Additionally, Rwanda received massive amounts of foreign aid to a degree that Malawi and other African nations never saw [1]
Unsurprising that this is an OpenPhilanthropy blog.
> Geography. Jeffrey Sachs and others have long argued that geography is destiny: landlocked, tropical, distant-from-markets countries face structural penalties through transport costs, disease burden, and weak agricultural conditions. Malawi has all three. Sure, but the empirical literature pegs the landlocked penalty at about 1% of annual growth. This is meaningful over decades, not enough to close a gap this large in per-capita income. Rwanda is more landlocked than Malawi and has grown faster. Uzbekistan is double-landlocked and has roughly tripled per-capita income since 2000.
The article discusses this, and compares it to other labor-extractive colonial states in subsaharan Africa. If there were an easy explanation, it appears like it would be in the article, which is pretty expansive.
The point of the article isn't "Malawi is poor compared to Europe," but rather comparing Malawi to other countries that were similarly colonized and how other colonized countries have done a lot better than Malawi - despite often having more adversity in their post-colonial existence.
Yes, being exploited will leave you in a bad state, but it's also important to learn why other similarly colonized countries have done a lot better over the past 30 years - what are the conditions and policies that improve things
It's not. The current vogue in the American social sciences is projecting America's Black-White / colonist-colonised dualism onto the world regardless of the facts on the ground.
Malawi was hunting and gathering until the 10th century [1] and colonised by Europeans in the late 19th century. That makes it simultaneously one of the last places in the contiguous old world to be settled and one of the last in Africa to have been European colonised. If the standard outliers to any macroeconomic theory are Japan and Argentina, then Malawi occupies a similar niche in theories of history and development.
There is no such thing as "average IQ" for countries. An ultra-common low-IQ take, ironically.
What is the average IQ of Malawi? Literally nobody knows. Anybody who claims one is lying to you. In "IQ & The Wealth Of Nations" (the Ur-source for these kinds of claims), they got a number for Malawi by averaging Congo, Zaire, and Tanzania. In turn, the Congo numbers were based in part on general cognitive test scores taken from 40 rural children being treated for parasitic infections, projected out to the whole population, and then modified down to "correct" for the Flynn Effect.
Those are the kinds of numbers you're citing when you make these kinds of claims.
Listen to yourself and reason about what you just said.
If you had a jar of 100 marbles and 90 of them were blue and 10 were green, you would have a average color of mostly blue.
You can average anything.
You are delusional if you think Malawi has an average IQ above 80.
I know a lot more about facts and statistics on race than you.
The marbles have been counted.
Recently, a group of Africans have conducted IQ tests themselves in Nigeria and found the numbers to be accurate.
There is in general no such thing as "national" or "national average" IQ, pretty much anywhere in the world, but that's doubly true in subsaharan Africa, where the numbers aren't just not representative but in many cases literally fabricated --- "interpolated" from neighbors and reconciled with economic statistics.
"Chat, can you show me an example of why correlation is not causation?"
The article actually addresses this specific point:
"Human capital is thin. Mean years of schooling sit around 5. Stunting rates have been at 35-40% for decades, with measurable downstream effects on adult cognition and earnings."
"-- It is also, upon reflection, mostly a description of being poor rather than an explanation. 'Malawi is poor because its agricultural productivity is low' is closer to a tautology than an answer."
> It ranks 107th out of 180 on Transparency International’s Corruption Perceptions Index, which is middling, but not especially bad, roughly comparable to Indonesia and Brazil.
I would still guess corruption is a major reason. Sometimes the way it’s measured and how it’s reported is not accurate. People internalize corrupt practices as normal and stop viewing it as corruption. A bribe is a gift, a nepotistic appointment is “taking care of one’s family”.
It also doesn’t always make sense to compare only corruption with other countries. Some may be more corrupt but they have enough positive factors that they develop better despite the corruption.
The Tranparency International's index is a horrible measure.
It's more dependent on the press reporting corruption than of any other factor, for the extent that it measures anything real it focuses exclusively on small scale corruption, and it incredibly biased by cultural factors.
It's a mistake to use it to compare one country with another, and it's a mistake to use it to spot trends in a single place. AFAIK, it's a mistake to use it.
Does anyone even give them credibility in the first place…?
Such an exceedingly complex thing just seems improbable to take at face value, without an enormous amount of proof and well reasoned methodology backing it up.
I've never seen a press outlet that didn't give them credibility.
A few times they notice that fighting against corruption is known to increase the index at a footnote somewhere. But that's rare.
It is notoriously difficult to gather accurate quantitative data on illegal or unethical activities. And the weightings in the index are rather arbitrary.
So corrupt even the reporting of corruption is corrupt?
Countries trying to become uncorrupt generally go way down because they can start reporting on found corruption. This means people care and so it is worth reporting.
That’s also a possibility. I was mainly thinking where it’s so embedded it’s not even perceived as corruption anymore.
But yeah, what you’re saying is also done. Usually something like an anti-corruption ministry is created. Their job is to find and prosecute corruption. Guess what the most “lucrative “ and cushiest jobs are now - that’s right, the anti corruption ministry itself. Anyone doing business now has to bribe them too in addition to whoever they bribed before. And corruption goes “down” officially, and it looks good on international external metrics.
I think just you can get a glimpse by what they export (from Wikipedia):
- Malawi: tobacco (55%), dried legumes (8.8%), sugar (6.7%), tea (5.7%), cotton (2%), peanuts, coffee, soy (2015 est.)
- Rwanda: Gold, tin ores, coffee, malt extract, rare earth ores
I can easily see why one has a higher GDP than the other. Very little mistery to me.
As the article states, that Malawi hasn't developed much industry or exports is more of a description of poverty than an explanation. Malawi can grow coffee, but mostly doesn't. They have rare earth element deposits, but little mining. Why haven't they developed more?
> They have rare earth element deposits, but little mining.
When it comes to mining it looks like china has been screwing them over https://adf-magazine.com/2026/02/chinese-mines-openly-break-...
"belt and road" in action
When you consider places that do have significant mining, it isn't like that investment is exclusively home grown. Often what happens is it comes from external capital seeking permissive governments willing to give claims to these natural resources to these external companies to make a profit off of.
The fact that there is little mining of the natural resources in Malawi paints a picture of a government that might be less influenced by foreign money than others in the global south, moreso than any statement on poverty.
Could it be that they haven't been so infected by the money bug that for now they still have a society oriented around happiness and maintaining traditional ways of life rather than economic attainment?
I live in South Africa and my gardener happens to be Malawian, as was a gardener my parents had when I was growing up.
They’re both good people with pride in their work, but they are from poverty and have little in the way of skills except for manual labour jobs.
They came to South Africa, like so many from nearby countries, as our significantly more developed economy offers far better earning opportunity.
Not relevant to your comment, but want to also mention this creates xenophobic tension with the section of the local population which is in poverty as they feel their jobs are stolen. While there are certainly cases where people illegally employ immigrants to pay them less than locals, in cases where pay is at least equal, Zimbabweans and Malawians tend to have reputation of being more honest and hard working than the indigenous population.
We have Nigerians come here too and by contrast they tend to be super scetchy.
I don't know why Malawi is poor but I was struck by how easily this comment can be paraphrased to describe somewhere thousands of miles distant.
*********
I live in North Texas and my gardener happens to be Mexican, as was a gardener my parents had when I was growing up.
They’re both good people with pride in their work, but they are from poverty and have little in the way of skills except for manual labor jobs.
They came to North Texas, like so many from nearby countries, as our significantly more developed economy offers far better earning opportunity.
Not relevant to your comment, but want to also mention this creates xenophobic tension with the section of the local population which is in poverty as they feel their jobs are stolen. While there are certainly cases where people illegally employ immigrants to pay them less than locals, in cases where pay is at least equal, Hondurans and Mexicans tend to have reputation of being more honest and hard working than the indigenous population.
We have Floridians come here too and by contrast they tend to be super sketchy.
********
I read your original comment and was struck by how well it fits the situation here in Texas. You could've made the same comment about South Africa 40 years ago and it would still translate to the situation in Texas.
I don't know how you feel about people coming to South Africa for a shot at a better life but have to say that I have the highest respect for those men and women who have left their homes and families across the border for an uncertain future here in the US despite knowing that it is quite true that in many jobs they will be paid less than locals who do less actual work. All of this while being gamed by employers who know that they are illegally in the country and who work closely with Immigration Officials to identify people who can be quickly rounded up and sent south to pad some politician's resume or to distract the public from some other more significant issue. The employers never suffer consequences though they are the ones who created the opportunity and actively assisted in concealing immigration status for many of the workers.
It is a complex issue that should be solvable but as long as there are powerless people to heap the blame on we will probably see this continue.
Yes, I was thinking as I wrote it that there are likely parallels to places in US.
And yes, it’s a complex issue for sure.
I’m convinced that the way out of poverty here is through education and sadly there is just a huge amount of apathy (when not corruption) at all levels here by the people who are supposed to be making it happen, from pupils, their parents, teachers, etc, all the way to the minister of education.
Meanwhile people like me pay huge amounts of tax and still need to pay for private schooling for my kids, private security and medical aid.
Essentially, most of the money I pay for tax is a charity intended for the poor, but due to apathy/incompetence/corruption, not nearly enough of it gets used effectively.
Parallels.
The wrong people capturing the resources that were earmarked for useful purposes and using them to enrich themselves.
They're fourth from the bottom on the happiness index. https://mwnation.com/malawi-named-the-4th-least-happiest-cou...
Would you want to live there?
There's barely any mines in Rwanda btw. DRC is closer to the later in terms of exports and I wouldn't say it's doing better.
Rwanda controls significant amount of mines in eastern drc(north kivu) through the m23 rebels.
Also, foreign aid. Rwanda received massive amounts of foreign aid unlike Malawi [0] and de facto colonized the DRC's mine fields [1]
[0] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/DT.ODA.ODAT.GN.ZS?locat...
[1] - https://www.reuters.com/world/africa/rwanda-exercises-comman...
Foreign aid is rarely a gift - in almost all cases it is a business transaction. It is given as a loan, or in return for some mineral rights, or for an important UN vote, or for allegiance in a war.
For the loan cases, the terms are often unaffordable, effectively handing effective control of the entire country to the entity who has the other end of the loan - it is the modern empire-by-debt.
The Rwanda case cannot be told without Paul Kagame, one of the rare authoritarians who is also a real nation-builder, analogous to Park Chung Hee (South Korea, 1960s-1970s). He locks up his opponents but also has leveraged aid to really help socioeconomic conditions. E.g., the very close and productive collaboration with Partners in Health/Paul Farmer.
Kagame cannot be compared to Park Chung Hee or LKY. Park's economic policies actually helped South Korea climb up the economic value chain, though a lot of that was also due to Japanese technology transfers to Korea in the 1960s-90s.
On the other hand, Kagame's execution on economic reform has been a failure when compared against Uganda, as Uganda [0] has a significantly more complex (ie. higher value) economy than Rwanda [1] despite also suffering a severe civil war in the 1990s and dealing with the Idi Amin's kleptocratic rule in the 1980s.
[0] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/800/export-basket
[1] - https://atlas.hks.harvard.edu/countries/646/export-basket
No.
A lot of foreign aid is direct things like food, medicine, doctors, AIDS prevention programmes, vaccines for specific things, maternal care, containment of an Ebola epidemic, etc.
Do you really think that e.g. Kenya is voting alongside EU members because the EU paid for a part of a highway between two cities in Kenya?
Then yes, there are loans and grants for infrastructure things.
> For the loan cases, the terms are often unaffordable, effectively handing effective control of the entire country to the entity who has the other end of the loan - it is the modern empire-by-debt.
That's not true. The rates are very public, and while sometimes they are on the higher end, unaffordable is a stretch, and that's how loan rates work. It is inherently risky to give loans to a developing country with high corruption rates. That's why there are also lots of direct grants or direct physical aid with stuff instead of money.
The IMF also sometimes gives loans with strict requirements on market reforms, which can be controversial. Notably in the former Soviet/Warsaw pact bloc, economic shock therapy under instruction of the IMF had some devastating short term consequences, and in some countries led to mass dubious privtisations. In most though, it paid off and led to rapid and sustained economic and social growth.
There are a few things to note here.
For both, around half of GDP is in the services sector. It doesn't matter that much what raw resources they export when it's a smaller portion of GDP (23% in Rwanda, 15% in Malawi). Also, almost all of those raw resources that Rwanda exports are stolen from the DRC by Rwanda-backed militias.
Foreign aid, and Rwanda's ability to position itself geopolitically as a trusted stable partner (which enables more aid and for it to get away with theft and murder) have more impact than maize vs gold.
And in the end, there are plenty of countries that have successfully developed and become less or not poor without having anything of serious value to export. From Bangladesh to the Balkans (I mean post-decolonisation Balkans, not post-Iron Curtain - it was mostly an area with subsistence farming as the main employment, disease, low rates of literacy and very low for higher education, frequent conflict and ethnic/religious tensions, few natural resources other than grain and some very limited amounts coal/minerals). If anything, it usually is the opposite, cf. the resource curse.
The agricultural exporters probably have a lot less heavy metal in their blood.
"70% of Malawians live on less than $2.15 a day. Under the World Bank’s revised $3-a-day poverty line, it’s 75%."
This sounds like an extremely bimodal distribution -- a 40% increase in the cut-off line only captures 5% more of the population, so only a small number of people are in this "poor but survivable" zone, with most well under and some well over, I assume. Does this map to the usual rural/urban divide?
Rwanda has prospered for the past three decades while Malawi has floundered because Rwanda is run by an effective dictator engaging in developmentalist nation-building. Malawi has no equivalent power center, and certainly none with the beneficence to try and raise up their countrymen.
Rwanda also got significantly more foreign aid than Malawi [0] and other peer countries in Southern and Eastern Africa.
A lot of Rwanda's success is overstated as well as I've pointed out before [1].
A better model from an LDC perspective would probably be Uganda.
[0] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/DT.ODA.ODAT.GN.ZS?locat...
[1] - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43375524
> The fertilizer subsidy program (FISP) consumes up to three-fourths the agriculture budget in some years to subsidize maize inputs for smallholders. It is politically untouchable because rural maize farmers are the median voter. Several administrations have made some attempt to reform it and backed down. Resources that could go to roads, irrigation, or diversification go to propping up the existing structure.
Idk, this one doesn't seem super difficult to diagnose. The political system has been captured by a special interest with consolidated control.
That describes plenty of very rich countries as well.
> describes plenty of very rich countries as well
Special interests, yes. Consolidation–as in a unified interest group representing a commanding majority of the economy–no. At least none that aren’t similarly stagnating.
> “Malawi is poor because its agricultural productivity is low” is closer to a tautology than an answer.
I used to make the same error. Thing is in the natural sciences this looks like circular reasoning, but in the humanities quite commonly things just hang in thin air. Case in point, the banker looks at the poor farmer and denies credit because the guy doesn't have capital, and the farmer doesn't have capital because he can't get credit. Thing is, both sides understand that.
The agricultural output of Finland is dismal, with the low-quality soil, short summer and frequent cold snaps. Still doing pretty good on GDP
Even with this, a farm in Finland I'm guessing is probably far more productive with better equipment and increased investment in fertilizer, pesticide, and utilization of elite cultivars, which have increased western yields in many crops by several fold change over the past 70 or 80 years (corn shown in 1, yellow denotes "old agriculture", green denotes introduction of industrial fertilizer, blue denotes introduction of hybrid engineered cultivars).
But Finland obviously has other economic sectors to rely upon than mainly farming.
1. https://scotthirwin.com/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/02212023_...
For those who don't "get it", it's output is not dismal, far from it LOL.
About 5M people, a fifth the population of Malawi, none the less are one of the top producers in the entire world for oats and barley. Not per capita... total. Wow. Note that only about 10% of the population farms which makes the ratio even crazier.
Finns as a whole somehow produce about 2x their entire countries body weight in barley per year which always freaks me out. The country is also one of the top 10, usually top 5, producers of oats in the entire world, and they're competing with giant countries like Canada and Russia. Giant Canada only produces about 3x as much oats as tiny Finland.
Finland climate isn't what you'd think of for tomatoes but they produce about three dozen tomatoes per capita every year, which is also weird to think about. Not just how do they grow that many tomatoes, but why? They like pasta sauce and pizza sauce that much?
However Finland is not massively wildly overpopulated with frequent famines like Malawi. Those conditions will annihilate a countries productivity, including ag productivity.
I'm left wondering what people in Malawi think about this. I have no idea whether they'd be better than this outside perspective at analysing the factors behind slow growth, but the comparison might be interesting regardless.
Perhaps there are cultural reasons that explain this, such as attitudes towards work, entrepreneurship, private ownership etc?
I have no idea if Rwanda and Malawi have difference there, but globally one can see clearly see the impact of culture. Just look at how well Japan did despite losing WW2 and having little natural resources, or how badly Russia has done despite its huge landmass and resources, because the political culture always seems to lead to really bad autocratic governance.
In my country (Finland) areas where Swedish speaking people are the majority do consistently better than neighbouring areas with Finnish speaking majority - lower unemployment, less health and social issues and so on. Some of that may be due to historical accumulation of wealth, but I'm convinced that mostly it's because of differences in cultural values and attitudes. Some studies indicate that the Swedish speakers tend to have better social life, which improves life outcomes in many ways.
More like: Rwanda has a competent dictator (and has had the same one for 26 years, more if you consider the years where he was the strongman behind the President). A competent dictator is better than an incompetent dictator -- or even, in many ways, an incompetent democracy.
Is Malawi an incompetent democracy? Based on the article it seems to have a functioning stable democracy.
Are you implying that a dictator would lead to Malawi becoming wealthy? Seems like a disturbing argument. If that’s not what you are implying then what are you implying?
Are you implying that a "functioning" democracy automatically leads to good decisions being made and crowd always has good wisdom regardless of the attributes of the crowd?
To lead a country to prosperity is as simple as letting a nation vote and counting their votes and then giving power to the guy they voted for?
Rule of law is the best enabler for economic growth.
I'll mention it here because it's tangentially related to your comment. The book "We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will be Killed With Our Families" about the Rwandan genocide and aftermath helped me understand the country and it's current state much better. The book has the added benefit of being from 1999 so has far fewer of the culture war components one would expect from a similar book released today.
This viewpoint never made sense to me, because you have variation within any culture, and because advantageous strategies win out over time, any culture will evolve. Therefore, it never made sense to me to consider culture a static immutable group of homogeneous people. To me it is pretty obvious that some systematic challenges must exist that keep what we consider to be successful strategies from succeeding in those environments.
Your examples of Russia and Japan are easily explained by geopolitics. Indeed, Japanese individuals don't tend to excel out of Japan while many Russians do.
> win out over time
And people define victory in different ways. Having many children is how some people define victory. Having no children and a diploma on the wall is how some people define victory.
Malawians have a reputation of being extremely kind people, maybe that makes them bad at capitalism?
I mean, is it beyond belief that many of them are OK with living a simple agrarian life? Or have very little opportunity to learn that there is any other way to live?
Makes you wonder if less public debt and less focus on growing cash crops to service that debt might actually make for a more comfortable 'simple agrarian life' overall. Even if this meant lower GDP.
I've often thought there's something wrong with the way we put a simple dollar figure on poverty. Less than $3 dollars a day with or without easy access to land, shelter, and fresh water?
In this community it is well beyond belief. It’s up there with UFOs and lizard people. Not extracting every. Last. Penny. From EVERYTHING no matter the impact. Anathema to a hardcore capitalist forum like this.
It would be the opposite. Kindness = respect for other's property = capitalism.
Immigrants to any country are a unique slice of the population because they chose to migrate for a better life. Hence immigrants in most countries tend to do well economically (sometimes after a generation). Uncertain that cultural differences are the reason for different economic outcomes you observe.
Swedish speakers in Finland are not immigrants anymore than Dutch speakers in Belgium are, though (the Dutch speaking area also generally does better than the French speaking areas, for a variety of reasons).
it is interesting to note that since the industrial revolution it was the french speaking part of belgium that flourished due to its steel industry, and the dutch speaking part was the poor one. only when the steel industry stopped being competitive the economy switched away from industry to service where the french part stagnated and the dutch part started to flourish,
so clearly who does better has nothing to do with the language but with the economy and who has the better resources and is more adaptable to serve the current needs.
There was significant repression on the Dutch language in Belgium not long ago. There was no Dutch university prior to 1930s and courts were solely in french for a long time.To this date there's still some Bruxellois who'll call you Sale Flamand (dirty Fleming) if you speak Dutch in the capital city. It is however way better now than 50+ years ago, my grandfather got beat up for speaking Dutch.
Saying language had no influence on who did better is inaccurate.
Which immigrants? A significant fraction of native Finnish citizens speak Swedish as their primary language. It used to be the same country.
why did you decide to mention Finland?
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48151476
They are usually richer too.
We don't know all the reasons, but I can guess one. Debt.
And yes, debt can be 'good'. But just as for people, if you are poverty stricken, debt will almost invariably not be.
Who actually benefited from taking on the debt?
Malawi needs to drop tobacco as their main export. Tobacco is hard on the soil and requires more fertilizer and acidifies the soil. Swapping out tobacco for something like a specialty coffee would be far better (and Rwanda has done that) Bringing some hard specie with Coffee would really help and the foreign aid could help them make the transition, which would take a few years to get going.
> Malawi needs to drop tobacco as their main export
That's the product they have most comparative advantage in producing. You're literally suggesting they should cut their income down, and try to get better at something else.
Tobacco is a crop that is experiencing declining demand. Neighboring Rwanda has built up their coffee export business, and Malawi could too. And as I mentioned it’s less harsh on the soil which is and added benefit.
Well, if the thing you're best at is something that doesn't make enough money, then maybe it is time to become better at something else.
But as you say, at least in the interim, that means reducing income, which is a really hard thing to suggest.
The Central African Republic, which has a low population density, lots of water and arable land is also very poor. As is South Sudan. It must be very hard to trade your way out of poverty if you are landlocked in a poor continent. All the countries in Europe are well off by world standards because there's an enormous market next-door.
The question isn't "why is Malawi poor compared to European countries", it's "why is Malawi poor compared to other countries in a similar – or worse – situation"
Look at the map in the article. It's a lot lighter in the middle than around the coastline. Niger, Chad, Burundi, South Sudan, CAR. These are all very poor. Malawi is not really an exception.
Merchant caravans are known from ancient times. If there was something valuable to sell, there likely would be a way to transport it to a nearest port (even if abroad) and still make a profit.
If one wants to vote with one's wallet:
https://www.heifer.org/our-work/where-we-work/malawi
Currently being matched 5 to 1.
This was an interesting thread to read as a Malawian living right here in Malawi and frustrated about our situation. As the article mentions, we have a lot of things going for us that should have us in a better situation - very few natural disasters, no wars/civil unrest, even though the rains are sketchy sometimes we generally have good rainfall and even though we have challenges with food sometimes, it's rare to hear someone actually died of hunger.
However, there are a multitude of problems that have resulted in us being where we are. Now mind you, I am just a software engineer not a development expert (but for some credibility, I was the first engineer at Malawian owned Credit Reference Bureau and built most of the software there and I have worked with Social Cash Transfer program before as a consultant).
* Infrastructure is a big problem, we have poor road infrastructure, almost no rail or airline industry though those are picking up as of recent years. Very few Malawians have access to electricity, I believe some reports indicated less than 10%. Most of our population lives in rural areas. Internet penetration is growing but even cell tower coverage is not yet there - our TELCOS have about 3-4 million subscribers max, we are a population of about 20 million people (maybe 40% under 19?) and yet our largest bank only has about 2 or 3 million customers.
* We have low literacy rates and high dropout rates especially in rural areas. This is worrying for a population with almost half being youth/children. Our school infrastructure is also not that great, it is not strange to find a class of students learning under a tree in some rural and peri-urban areas.
* Corruption and mismanagement of funds - this is a big problem here. A lot of the money in the government programs and NGO/Donor programs finds it's way into individuals' pockets. Some of the initiatives are well meaning but because of corruption and pilfering of funds the impact isn't always felt at the level that's expected.
* Mismanagement of Natural resources - we have deposits of gold, rutile, uranium and other materials - we have companies from Australia/China and the likes setting up and possibly benefitting without giving much back to the country besides some veiled Corporate Social Responsibility activities, with parts of the funds going into people's pockets - we need to do better to control our resources but the low literacy rates and lack of awareness of some of these things affects how we as citizens react.
* There's lots online about our agriculture, so I won't spend too much time there - only to say we need to do better to mechanize and not rely too much on the rain cycles. I'm saying this as someone who has gotten into farming recently and is frustrated by how... manual it all is :)
There's a lot more I could say but I hope this give somewhat of a picture.
I should just mention, Malawians are some of the brightest most hardworking people you will ever meet but also trustworthy and loyal. You will probably meet a Malawian doctor in any part of the world and our software engineers are getting there too, we just need the exposure and opportunity to prove ourselves. I help moderate a community of developers and I can tell you we have talent and we do come cheap (even as low as $25/hr ;)
If you are ever in the market to try working with some Malawians, contact is on the profile :)
Thank you for sharing your perspective.
I honestly think the lack of education is a major issue. Malawi has a relatively low literacy rate compared with many other countries in Southern Africa.
because a country has "functioning" democracy doesn't mean the democracy is good for the country.
at times a strategic leadership is needed, with idealogical & succession planning.
Malawi has had neither.
I spent a while sitting in Malawi pondering that. A while ago but I don't think it's changed much. In many ways it's not a poor as you'd think from the GDP figures - most people have housing and enough food and the place is friendly and pleasant. I figured a lot is due to the exchange rate making things cheap because they don't have a good source of foreign income. The exports are mostly agricultural stuff that doesn't go for much money and the other obvious thing of tourism and holiday homes doesn't work well because the malaria is terrible there.
In fact I see the article doesn't mention malaria but most places you go they say oh yeah there were some cases a year ago twenty miles ago but in Nkhata Bay when I was there it was like a thousand cases in the village and a backpacker went the the loos the previous night and was found dead beside them in the morning.
The conclusion of the article is interesting:
> 'The unit of analysis for "why is X poor" may be the political coalition, not the country.'
So maybe the real question here is not about the absolute poverty, but the derivative: "Why hasn't Malawi seen meaningful growth for 30 years?" — And the answer could be surprisingly related to first-world countries like Finland that also have experienced decades of stunted growth.
Like Malawi, Finland has functional and stable multiparty politics. Like Malawi, Finland's politicians have spent decades locally optimizing for minor benefits towards their preferred flavor of the median voter (right wing cuts taxes a bit, left wing improves benefits a bit, nobody offers anything transformative).
Too much stability at the wrong time might be a slow curse.
Finnish GDP per capita is growing much, much faster than Malawi's: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.CD?locat...
This is not accurate, because it's not adjusted for inflation. There hasn't been real GDP growth in Finland for 20 years. This is more accurate comparison: https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NY.GDP.PCAP.PP.KD?end=2...
Is Finland doing that badly? It seems like a good place to live
Rwanda serves as the occident's proxy to extract minerals from the kivu soil, it has been occupying it since the end of the genocide on the pretence of pursuing the genocidal troops that fled there. There is absolutely no surprise here, it's rich becaus it plunders the richest soil on earth.
Regarding Rwanda, I think we're forgetting that a large part of their success comes from their plundering of the Congo's resources, mineral and otherwise.
There have been two gigantic continent-wide wars over the Congo, for fuck's sake.
> Malawi has also long been a darling of donors. Malawi’s aid per capita in 2023 was roughly 2.5x the global average.
Maybe the population doesn't feel like it needs to be productive, if they're continuing to receive such generous largesses. Isn't that the goal of UBI for developed nations? People should be able to pursue their passions and not have to worry about the necessities of life?
Malawi is poor because there is no reason for it to grow above the normal growth rate. Countries usually find themselves in a high growth situation if they are at the cross-road of major trade or geopolitics (ie: Singapore, UAE, korea, Taiwan, etc.) Of course the opportunity has to be cultivated but it has to be there in the first place.
There isn't much in Africa especially in the part of Malawi. They are not even coastal (they are landlocked) which makes their situation even worse.
Botswana is also landlocked, and not very fertile. They have diamond mines though.
It's very strange what they don't discuss, especially when it seems to answer supposedly unanswerable questions.
I rooted around in wikipedia and Malawi has FAR more people than the land can support. They have a top down demand they must grow maize although the land and climate are very unsuited for maize. Why? Unsurprisingly they have had severe recent famines unlike Rwanda. If they had capacity they could survive a minor shortfall in rain but they have more people than the land can support so the famines are very rough. They have about 3x the agricultural land as Rwanda but its not suited to maize but its demanded they grow maize. Maize will only grow with massive fertilizer imports which they cannot afford and occasionally politically/economically manage to totally screw up, alongside Maize is traditionally dependent on very reliable rainfall or post industrial era advanced irrigation which they don't have.
I would estimate the geography of Rwanda will support about 20M people, luckily they have about 14M. They can coast thru some rough agricultural times and they've developed enough industry and trade that they can import their way thru short term minor local problems.
On the other hand Malawi can only support maybe 15M people reliably, unfortunately they have about 22M. When the rains don't come or the politicians screw up the fertilizer imports, they die.
Its very difficult for them to "advance" beyond subsistence ag without enough to feed everyone and ag policies seemingly intended to be self destructive.
I don't know why they "have to" grow maize despite it resulting in starvation. Historically this type of thing is caused by someone making a huge profit or attempting to maintain control. Regardless of cause, until they can eat, they will not advance.
After eating dinner tonight they can dig a mine or build a factory. Oh wait there is no dinner tonight. Well then. And so they remain very poor, permanently.
The country, as a plot of land, is quite wealthy. $22B is a lot of money. If they had, say, 3M people as a population they'd be in position to become the next Taiwan. Taiwan's GDP per capita was about there in the mid 80s before they really took off. But they have over 20M people probably 30M soon, so they'll live in poverty, permanently.
In Rwanda an unusually good harvest means a new mine can be opened and they will "permanently" be richer. In Malawi an unusually good harvest means the people who would have starved to death this year now won't starve to death until next year. There will be no permanent improvement of anything in Malawi.
Poor? They're just minding their own business. smh.
This is a dumb take that highlights the common lack of experience with Africa that arises with anyone who writes about it - Malawi was always much poorer than the rest of East Africa as can be seen by the 1990 HDI [0].
Starting from a lower base as well as weak institutions, weak capital markets, and political instability during the transition to democracy lead Malawi to underperform.
Additionally, Rwanda received massive amounts of foreign aid to a degree that Malawi and other African nations never saw [1]
Unsurprising that this is an OpenPhilanthropy blog.
[0] - https://countryeconomy.com/hdi?year=1990
[1] - https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/DT.ODA.ODAT.GN.ZS?locat...
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It does, repeatedly, and compares it to other landlocked countries.
There is a full paragraph under "Geography"
It does:
> Geography. Jeffrey Sachs and others have long argued that geography is destiny: landlocked, tropical, distant-from-markets countries face structural penalties through transport costs, disease burden, and weak agricultural conditions. Malawi has all three. Sure, but the empirical literature pegs the landlocked penalty at about 1% of annual growth. This is meaningful over decades, not enough to close a gap this large in per-capita income. Rwanda is more landlocked than Malawi and has grown faster. Uzbekistan is double-landlocked and has roughly tripled per-capita income since 2000.
Did you even ctrl+f?
Yes, but for "land locked". I've been owned.
I seriously don’t get the mentality you have.
You didn’t read the article, but you did a half-hearted search for some reason, and posted a completely incorrect comment as a result.
Why? What are you trying to achieve?
When people claim that LLMs don’t have superhuman intelligence yet, this kind of behavior is a counterexample.
Nobody's perfect, friend. You're totally right.
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So were lots of other countries that went on to grow a lot faster. That's what the article is about.
The article discusses this, and compares it to other labor-extractive colonial states in subsaharan Africa. If there were an easy explanation, it appears like it would be in the article, which is pretty expansive.
The point of the article isn't "Malawi is poor compared to Europe," but rather comparing Malawi to other countries that were similarly colonized and how other colonized countries have done a lot better than Malawi - despite often having more adversity in their post-colonial existence.
Yes, being exploited will leave you in a bad state, but it's also important to learn why other similarly colonized countries have done a lot better over the past 30 years - what are the conditions and policies that improve things
Can you cite a reference for this assertion? I'd like to read about it if true.
> Can you cite a reference for this assertion?
It's not. The current vogue in the American social sciences is projecting America's Black-White / colonist-colonised dualism onto the world regardless of the facts on the ground.
Malawi was hunting and gathering until the 10th century [1] and colonised by Europeans in the late 19th century. That makes it simultaneously one of the last places in the contiguous old world to be settled and one of the last in Africa to have been European colonised. If the standard outliers to any macroeconomic theory are Japan and Argentina, then Malawi occupies a similar niche in theories of history and development.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bantu_expansion
didn't europeans colonize and destroy everything in the United States?
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Are you imagining a drama before it actually happens?
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There is no such thing as "average IQ" for countries. An ultra-common low-IQ take, ironically.
What is the average IQ of Malawi? Literally nobody knows. Anybody who claims one is lying to you. In "IQ & The Wealth Of Nations" (the Ur-source for these kinds of claims), they got a number for Malawi by averaging Congo, Zaire, and Tanzania. In turn, the Congo numbers were based in part on general cognitive test scores taken from 40 rural children being treated for parasitic infections, projected out to the whole population, and then modified down to "correct" for the Flynn Effect.
Those are the kinds of numbers you're citing when you make these kinds of claims.
Listen to yourself and reason about what you just said. If you had a jar of 100 marbles and 90 of them were blue and 10 were green, you would have a average color of mostly blue. You can average anything. You are delusional if you think Malawi has an average IQ above 80.
This isn't responsive to anything I wrote. Nobody has counted any marbles here.
I know a lot more about facts and statistics on race than you. The marbles have been counted. Recently, a group of Africans have conducted IQ tests themselves in Nigeria and found the numbers to be accurate.
Sounds super plausible.
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There is in general no such thing as "national" or "national average" IQ, pretty much anywhere in the world, but that's doubly true in subsaharan Africa, where the numbers aren't just not representative but in many cases literally fabricated --- "interpolated" from neighbors and reconciled with economic statistics.
"Chat, can you show me an example of why correlation is not causation?"
The article actually addresses this specific point:
"Human capital is thin. Mean years of schooling sit around 5. Stunting rates have been at 35-40% for decades, with measurable downstream effects on adult cognition and earnings."
"-- It is also, upon reflection, mostly a description of being poor rather than an explanation. 'Malawi is poor because its agricultural productivity is low' is closer to a tautology than an answer."
This is a repugnant and fairly despicable slur. Shame on you.