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The overthrow of Zaire's (now the Democratic Republic of Congo's) long-time dictator, Mobutu Sese Seko, had barely been accomplished in 1997 when the victor, Laurent Kabila, heard the standard Western clamor for democracy.Read more at location 946
Interestingly, we are now hearing similar ideas expressed for the post-conflict Afghanistan. Read more at location 948
The push for instant democracy in 1997 in the new Congo somehow seemed unfair.Read more at location 948
What then was the reward for leading a risky revolution that eliminated the person who had led his country to more than thirty years of negative average economic growth?Read more at location 950
History makes clear that democratic institutions have little chance of survival when the standard of living is this low.Read more at location 954
One also has to recall that the prospects for democracy in Africa looked better in the 1960s than they do now. However, the optimistic outlook in the 1960s was never realistic;Read more at location 959
Democracy, in the sense of political rights and civil liberties, is, in any case, not the characteristic of institutions that matters most for economic performance.Read more at location 961
although some dictators have delivered good economic results-Pinochet in Chile, Lee in Singapore, Fujimori for awhile in Peru, Park in South Korea, and the shah in Iran-the list of economic failures among dictators is larger: Marcos in the Philippines, Mao in China, Saddam Hussein in Iraq, Duvalier in Haiti, and a cast of despots in sub-Saharan Africa.Read more at location 963
The favorable economic effects from democracy seem, however, to disappear once a country attains a moderate degree of liberalization, such as that characteristic through the 1990s in places such as Malaysia, Mexico, and Turkey. Further expansions of democratic freedoms toward the Western ideal seem to come at the expense of economic growth. Read more at location 965
Such a system tends to favor redistributions from rich to poor and, more specifically, the expansions of social welfare programsRead more at location 967
maintenance of secure property rights, promotion of the rule of law, fostering of free markets domestically and for international trade, macroeconomic stability, and investments in education, health, and some forms of infrastructure.Read more at location 969
Singapore, Chile, Peru, China, South Korea, Taiwan,Read more at location 971
there is a good deal of evidence that economic prosperity leads eventually to sustainable expansions of democracy.Read more at location 971
The best advice that outsiders could have offered Kabila, before he was assassinated in 2001 and then succeeded by his son, was not to focus on elections and power sharing but rather to emphasize the growth-promoting policiesRead more at location 972
